Rowell Investigation Dream Team

Tom Carey, (seen here signing a book at the Roswell festival in 2011) a UFO researcher living in Pennsylvania and one of the authors of Witness to Roswell, realized that there was a great deal of work left to be done on the Roswell UFO case. You might say that his dream was to pull all the information together, to locate and interview the witnesses who have yet to tell their stories, verify as best as possible the facts of the case, and write it all down in a coherent and rational analysis. To help with this project, Tom worked to bring together a team of researchers who understood this case. He succeeded in convincing both Don Schmitt and me to join him in his quest.

Don Schmitt had, in the late 1980s, realized there was still work to be done on the Roswell case. The surface had only been scratched by others. With the support of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, he began his research. One of the things he did was invite me to join him, believing that my military experience would be of help in understanding Army operations and in communicating with retired military personnel on their level.

As everyone who has been paying attention knows, Don (seen here are the Roswell Festival in 2011) and I had a falling out over some research techniques and matters unrelated to the investigation. While these seemed important then, it could be said that in time we reevaluated these issues. We reconnected after I returned from Iraq and it was as if no time had passed.

A couple of months ago Tom asked me if I was willing to join him in putting together what he thought of as the ultimate Roswell crash book. I was enthusiastic about the idea and readily agreed.

After Tom and I had discussed what we thought needed to be covered, Tom approached Don with the same idea. Don also thought it a good idea and the Dream Team was born (can I, as a participant, refer to it as a Dream Team?).

Although we are still, more or less, in the planning stages, we have already made some discoveries. I have learned of a doctor who might have participated in an autopsy of the alien creatures. True enough, we have heard this before, but the man is a doctor, was a doctor then, and is now willing to talk about what he had seen.

Also true, I have not verified all of what he said, but there are some indications that he is who he claims to be. I mention this only because it is one of the first things that we have learned.

We have also begun, again, to use FOIA in an attempt to learn more about the Air Force investigation of the Roswell case. This means, simply, that we have again gone to the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force to review documents that relate to their Roswell investigation. We wanted to know what transpired in the meetings, what was written in the memos, and what the internal reports might have said.

I tried this once before. I spent three years chasing this information, finally locating what they had at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. But all that was there was the results of that investigation and nothing about the internal operations of it (Air Force Roswell investigation files seen here. Instead there were video tapes of witnesses, most of them gathered for the Fund for UFO Research, a Court Martial of a doctor who was having an affair with a nurse in 1957 and completely irrelevant to the investigation, lots of reports on balloons and Mogul, but nothing that answered my basic questions. So now we’ve started that process all over.

What we want to do is distill the information. We want to eliminate the nonsense from the case, whether it is Air Force explanations or witness testimony that is irrelevant or untrue.

You might say that we are starting all over, on a cold case, reviewing everything related to determine what is important. Sure, we all believe that what fell at Roswell was alien, but we are going to take the path that leads to the truth. We will attempt to eliminate our personal biases in favor of determining what happened now nearly 65 years ago.

Periodically we will provide updates about the investigation, letting people know where we are going. We plan to pull it all together in a book that will answer the various questions as best we can. Yes, we know that we won’t be able to please everyone... what if we find a terrestrial explanation that actually works? Then the UFO community will be angry... And if we find that it was something alien, well, I doubt that the Skeptics will be satisfied.

So now we begin again, not from our own goal-line to be sure but somewhere down the field and this time we will find the answer and the proof to support that answer.