As anyone who has been following
the Roswell case knows, we, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and I,
have been searching for documentation for, literally, decades. We have, of
course, all the newspaper articles, the FBI Telex, and one or two hints of
something strange falling outside Roswell. We have no diaries, letters,
journals or other written statements from the time of the crash that mention
the crash. One of the possible exceptions is a magazine article written by Inez
Wilcox, wife of the sheriff, that mentions the little men. The problem is that
there is no date on it, and the article might have been written after the
Roswell crash became prominent in 1978. We need something from 1947.
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| Don and me on the Impact Site. |
We did find a diary
that had been kept by Ruth Barnett. Her niece, Alice Knight told me that she
had found the diary in a box of material she had received after the death of
her aunt. The diary, a daily reminder book for the year 1947, was in there and
Ruth used it as a diary. She made entries for the entire year of 1947 and there
is no mention of any UFO crash on the Plains of San Agustin.
Stan Friedman, when I
met him so that we could copy the diary, suggested that Barney Barnett had been
warned about keeping quiet, so he wouldn’t have told Ruth about his adventures
over on the Plains. However, according to Vern Maltais, a good friend of Barnett,
said that he’d learned of the crash when Barney told him about it at
Thanksgiving. That suggests that Barnett wasn’t cowed by the orders to remain quiet,
and even if he hadn’t mentioned it in July, he was talking about it in November.
There is no notation in the diary about this amazing story that Barney had
shared with friends and family during that Thanksgiving get together. There is just
nothing said about it until Bill Moore interviewed Barnett’s boss after 1978.
The other document, to
surface recently was the alleged diary of Jesse Marcel. This was a standard
Army “Memorandum” book that the Army handed out by the hundreds of thousands
over the years. I’d had several of them during my military career. Since that book
was found in Jesse Marcel’s the possessions, it might have provided a clue
about the crash. Unfortunately, once again, there was nothing in it to suggest
a crash. To make it worse, handwriting analysis suggested that Marcel had not
made the notations in the book.
I have learned in the
last several months there was another officer in the office with Marcel. Major
Dalton Smith was assigned to the 509th Bomb Group in 1947, and his office
number matches that of Marcel. I know nothing much about Smith, other than he
was there in 1947 and had the same number. It suggests to me that Smith might
be the author of the notations in the Memorandum book. And since the notations
aren’t all that personal, when Smith left the 509th, he left that
book behind… Or, when Marcel left, he threw it in box with other items. At any
rate, there is nothing of consequence in the book.
The notable one exception to all this was a two-paragraph
mention in a Saga magazine article published in the Winter 1974 issue.
B. Ann Slate and Stan Friedman, in the article “UFO Battles the Air Force
Couldn’t Coverup,” report that Lydia Sleppy had said that her attempt to put
the story of the crash over the news wire had been interrupted. You can read about that here:
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/05/lydia-sleppy-1973-interview.html
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/reports-of-roswell-crash-before-jesse.html
So, we now reach the latest bit of corroboration. I
believe that I’m the only researcher to have ever interviewed Major Edwin
Easley, the base provost marshal in 1947. He would have been responsible for
security at the crash site and on the base. In my interviews, he told me,
several times that he couldn’t talk about it because he had been sworn to
secrecy. He said that he had promised the president he wouldn’t talk about it.
Skeptics, of course,
criticized the statement, wondering if the president would talk to a lowly
major. I was of the opinion Easley certainly could have made the promise to an emissary
of the president. Both Don and I had learned of several secret service agents
who had been dispatched to Roswell in 1947.
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| Major Edwin Easley |
In a letter dated
December 30, 1947, and addressed to Colonel Blanchard, the Roswell base
commander, we do have some corroboration for Easley’s help. While the opening
paragraph seems to be seasonal boilerplate, meaning it talks about the season
and “Your efforts in our behalf repeatedly served to great advantage.”
The second paragraph is
the important one. It says, “In these regards, Major Edwin D. Easley, Provost
Marshal and his able staff has been particularly helpful. Their intelligent
understanding of investigative problems, their devotion and their untiring diligence,
regardless of circumstances, had been directly responsible for the successful
conclusion of many difficult undertakings.”
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| The Easley Letter |
While this can be
viewed as a generic “atta-boy” letter, it is relevant because of the timeframe,
1947, and that I currently know of no other event in which Easley would have
been involved in something with the Secret Service. It does underscore Easley’s
involvement and helps establish that Easley might well have promised the
president that he wouldn’t talk about it by making that promise to the Secret
Service representative rather to the president directly. As I have said, this
is the latest document relating to the Roswell crash and one of the few that we
have.
