Chasing More Footnotes

Richard Dolan

Given that we have been discussing some of the testimony from Bill Brazel, and since most of that information came from interviews that Don Schmitt and I conducted on a number of occasion both in person and over the telephone, I thought we’d make another run on chasing footnotes. In UFOs and the National Security State by Richard Dolan, he wrote, “Bill also claimed that sometime after the crash, he discussed the foil with some friends in a Corona [NM] bar. Then in his words, “lo and behold, here comes the military out to the ranch, a day or two later [which is not in the original interview with Brazel… Friedman made the addition in parenthesis and Dolan left those out in his quote… later, in a different interview, Brazel suggested it was the next day].” They told him they had learned of his possession of “some bits and pieces” of debris, and wanted him to relinquish them. They reminded him that his father had turned over everything that he had found. The younger Brazel gave up the pieces. The men told him that they “would rather you didn’t talk very much about it.”

The footnote leads me to Stan Friedman and Don Berliner’s Crash at Corona. There on pages 84 – 85 in a long section that quotes Bill Brazel apparently verbatim. There is nothing in the Friedman book to tell where, when, how or who conducted the interview. The impression seems to be that either Friedman, Berliner, or maybe both had conducted the interview. As happens so often Dolan’s footnote leads to another source, but that is a dead end.

Of course, I know the source of the interview. On February 19, 1989, Don Schmitt and I met Bill Brazel in Carrizozo, New Mexico. We interviewed him for about an hour or so, all recorded, with his permission, on audiotape. The interview was first published in UFO Crash at Roswell, providing the details of the interview. I don’t know why Dolan didn’t acknowledge that because, from the bibliography in his book, it was clear that he had a copy of ours.

The point is that the footnote (endnote technically) in Dolan’s book leads to a dead end. While it was certainly be appropriate to acknowledge Friedman’s book in his footnote, it would be proper to provide the information leading to the original source which, it turns out, is the more accurate source. Friedman added to the interview without appropriate acknowledgement and Dolan quoted it as if it was accurate. Such is the way too often in UFO research.