Friday, January 07, 2011

How I Learned about the Roswell Mortician

Not all that long ago someone asked how I had learned of Glenn Dennis (seen below), the Roswell mortician. The correspondent suggested that he had searched the literature and couldn’t find out how I had learned of him, or how Stan Friedman had learned of him.

Stan, I believe, and he’ll be quick to correct me if I’m wrong, learned about the mortician through a friend of the mortician. I’m not sure if it was Robert Shirkey, a Roswell resident who had been a member of the 509th Bomb Group in 1947 or someone else. The point is that someone in Roswell gave Stan the name and he went in search of him.

I, on the other hand, had been told of a mortician and was given a name. The name I had belonged to a man who lived in Albuquerque and who worked at the main library there. I found the guy and talked to him but he had never lived in Roswell and had never been a mortician.

On that same trip to New Mexico, Don Schmitt and I visited with Walter Haut. We were sitting in the living room of his house and I was asking questions, trying to get a name for the mortician.

Walter said, "I know the name you’re fishing for. It’s Glenn Dennis."

So I learned of Dennis from Walter Haut.

Not long after that, while in Roswell to tape the documentary, UFO Secret: The Roswell Crash, Mark Wolf, with the help of Walter Haut encouraged Dennis to accompany them on a trip out to the Debris Field near Corona. On that trip, Wolf learned more of the Dennis tale and encouraged Dennis to tell it on tape.

The first of the interviews was done by Wolf late one evening. After we had him on tape, Dennis thought that he would like another interview done with him dressed in a suit and the ever present New Mexico string tie. I conducted that interview, following the lead that Wolf had established.

That should answer the question about how I learned of Glenn Dennis. I asked Walter Haut and he told me.

9 comments:

jeff thompson said...

Glenn Dennis - a total fraud. How can he claim he knew the autopsy nurse, yert he can't produce her name? And she was supposedly transferred offf the base overnight. That just doesn't happen. What nonsense.

PJT in CR

cda said...

He may be a fraud but he certainly would have made good dog food.
It was Dennis's bones that were going to be dug out of the sand if he said too much at the time. See his affidavit.

David Rudiak said...

Dennis' overall story about the bodies and the call for child-size caskets now has a LOT of corroboration. See my website for a summary:

www.roswellproof.com/dennis.html

This also covers the question of why Dennis did not provide the correct name for the nurse. He may have been trying to protect the identity of the nurse, still alive and living in Roswell, with the name of Mary Lowe.

Schmitt and Carey said they found out about Lowe through an independent source, who told them Lowe had described seeing the bodies. They tracked her down to Roswell and had her interviewed by Wendy Connors. Lowe denied everything, but some of her back story seemed to fit Dennis' "Nurse X", such as being transferred to the UK. When Schmitt/Carey then asked Dennis about Lowe, they say he blurted out something like, "Oh she knows everything." The next day he retracted the statement. But the main point is that Dennis knew who Mary Lowe was.

The one time I met Dennis in 2001 his story was that one of names in the pseudonym Naomie Marie Selff was correct, thus I presume the Marie part. He also said his three daughters knew the correct name, and they were free to give it out after his death. If that's the case, then we may find out if Mary Lowe was indeed the mysterious Nurse X.

It is also possible he made the nurse a composite of several to further protect her identity. Thus he was known to pal around with another nurse of similar description named Eileen Fanton, with some of the same history as his "Nurse X". The secretary to the hospital administrator, Miriam Bush, was also similar physically, and according to family members had also seen the bodies.

Steve Sawyer said...

Kevin, what parts of Glenn Dennis' stories about Roswell do you consider true, and which untrue?

Why do you think he elaborated on the true, if any, parts? He seems to be one of the more controversial Roswell "witnesses" from what I can recall. Do you think there was a real nurse who saw bodies at the hospital?

cda said...

One aspect of Dennis' story intrigues me. The much maligned McAndrew report "CASE CLOSED" on p. 94-99 refers to a KC-97 "aircraft mishap" in which 11 airmen were killed 8 miles south of Walker AFB. This was in June 1956 and McAndrew says that much of what Dennis is talking about refers in fact to this crash, although it was 9 years after Roswell.

There is nothing impossible here as the first interviews with Dennis were not until 1989 and people's memories of dates in the past can be very unreliable, unless they kept diaries or personal notes of events.

Dennis may indeed have concatenated memories of several past events in his testimony. I wonder if any newspaper reports of the 1956 crash mention either Dennis or the Ballard Funeral Home. Has anyone ever checked this? McAndrew does say the Ballard home was involved.

Just a thought.

David Rudiak said...

One aspect of Dennis' story intrigues me. The much maligned McAndrew report "CASE CLOSED" on p. 94-99 refers to a KC-97 "aircraft mishap" in which 11 airmen were killed 8 miles south of Walker AFB. This was in June 1956 and McAndrew says that much of what Dennis is talking about refers in fact to this crash, although it was 9 years after Roswell.

This is just another of counterintelligence agent McAndrew's time travel theories for Roswell, like the crash dummies from the 1950s likewise supposedly "explaining" bodies.

There is nothing impossible here as the first interviews with Dennis were not until 1989 and people's memories of dates in the past can be very unreliable, unless they kept diaries or personal notes of events.

So you don't remember which decade, much less year, Kennedy was assassinated in because you didn't keep a diary? How about when men first landed on the moon? Or the Falkland's war? Think you might remember those without a diary decades later?

In reality, humans tend to remember very unusual, important, and emotional events quite well. We don't get the decades mixed up.

But world-renowned memory expert and OSI agent McAndrew says humans suffer from "time compression" of memory and that explains all, so it must be true.

Dennis may indeed have concatenated memories of several past events in his testimony. I wonder if any newspaper reports of the 1956 crash mention either Dennis or the Ballard Funeral Home. Has anyone ever checked this? McAndrew does say the Ballard home was involved.

Several witnesses tell us Dennis was talking about the base call for small caskets, not only at the time in 1947, but also over the next few years. Maybe most notable was the former Roswell police chief L. M. Hall, who said Dennis was talking to him about the call for small caskets to bury or ship the aliens back at the time it all happened. Another one was attorney Richard L. Bean, who said he heard about the child-size casket call a year or two later. Three friends of Dennis, Rex Alcorn, Clifford Butts, and William Burkstaller, also recalled Dennis talking about it back at the time of Roswell.

Maybe some more time traveling dead crew members from McAndrew's 1956 plane crash?

cda said...

Curious indeed. If L.M.Hall is correct about what Dennis said to him in 1947 it means that Dennis, very soon after being told he would make good "dog food" when his bones were dug out of the desert, repeated the tale about the aliens to a police officer friend of his!

Thus Dennis does not seem to have been deterred by the threats from the military.

Pflock has quite a bit to say about this in his book (chapter 12). He was impressed by the similarities to the 1956 crash, but not impressed with the story related to him by Hall.

As to whether people can recall dates even approximately, why doesn't DR try an experiment and ask, say, 20 friends in what year was JFK assassinated, the first moon landing or the Falklands War? Some people can recall dates well (the year anyway), a great many certainly cannot. It depends very much on the event, the person, the circumstances, the possible connection with other events at the same time and so on.

Marcel could not recall the relevant date (even the year), yet Dennis supposedly did.

Try the dates experiment and see. Try to pick friends of average intelligence (whatever that means) to do the test.

Even recent events fool people. Everyone remembers '9-11', don't they? Now try that on some friends and see how many get the year wrong? When was hurricane Katrina, or the tsunami in Indonesia?

But I have a feeling we are straying off the original topic, again.

David Rudiak said...

cda wrote:
Curious indeed. If L.M.Hall is correct about what Dennis said to him in 1947 it means that Dennis, very soon after being told he would make good "dog food" when his bones were dug out of the desert, repeated the tale about the aliens to a police officer friend of his! Thus Dennis does not seem to have been deterred by the threats from the military.

Curious indeed. If Dennis didn't repeat the story back then, then to a debunker this is evidence he made it all up or is confusing it with some later event.

But if he did repeat part of the story back then, it is evidence he wasn't threatened, therefore it still never happened.

With DebunkerLogic, you can never win.

But back in the RealWorld, some people might talk to people they trust and some won't, especially if they are a little cryptic in what they say. What witnesses say Dennis told them at the time wasn't the complete story, just about the strange call from the base for child-size caskets. L.M. Hall, e.g., said he thought Dennis was joking about the caskets for the aliens. If Dennis didn't push the point, that might be what most people would think.

Pflock has quite a bit to say about this in his book (chapter 12). He was impressed by the similarities to the 1956 crash, but not impressed with the story related to him by Hall.

So if Pflock said it, you can take it to the bank, right? Actually since all of these witnesses, except for Hall, post-date Pflock, I rather doubt he had anything at all to say about them.

Shame. He was so good at dismissing witness testimony with ridiculous rationalizations, like Cpt. Pappy Henderson was supposedly a "practical joker" pulling a fast one on his wife, daughter, son, business partner, and old WWII plane crew. I'm sure cda swallowed that one too.

Or another of Pflock's theories about the child-size caskets was that Roswell had a polio epidemic. So it was that AND the 1956 plane crash. And we might throw in McAndrew's red-headed Cpt. Kittinger and his 1959 ballooning accident that made his head swell, thus making him look like an alien. Yeah, no doubt Dennis confused that as well.

As to whether people can recall dates even approximately, why doesn't DR try an experiment and ask, say, 20 friends in what year was JFK assassinated, the first moon landing or the Falklands War? Some people can recall dates well (the year anyway), a great many certainly cannot. It depends very much on the event, the person, the circumstances, the possible connection with other events at the same time and so on.

Which is what I said. If an event is important, highly out of the ordinary, and we have a close connection or very emotional reaction to the event, then these tend to get deeply imprinted on our memories. It's the way long-term memory works, and it is a survival mechanism. In contrast, what we had for lunch a week ago is routine and doesn't matter.

Even recent events fool people. Everyone remembers '9-11', don't they? Now try that on some friends and see how many get the year wrong? When was hurricane Katrina, or the tsunami in Indonesia?

Actually the burden of proof is on the debunkers to prove the McAndrew/Weaver super time-compression theory. I'll bet 90++% won't get the decade wrong even if they get the exact year wrong. Thus a plane crash from 1956 or a balloon crash from 1959, or crash dummies form 1953-1959 getting confused with 1947? Highly unlikely, much less literally everybody could get that wrong.

And if you get a bunch of witnesses confirming someone like Dennis was talking about it circa 1947, not 1956, then it still doesn't count with DebunkerLogic, because Dennis wasn't afraid to talk a little bit.

cda said...

Kevin:
You raised the subject of Glenn Dennis. Steve Sawyer asked you some questions about Dennis.

I'll repeat them. Which parts of Dennis' tale do you accept and which do you reject? Since you are still an avid ET proponent (regarding Roswell) do you have reason to reject ANY of his testimony?

And where do you stand on L.M.Hall's affidavit? And on the others' testimony (i.e. those others named by DR)?