Another Roswell Witness - Sort Of

Nearly thirty years ago John Keel, one of those self-styled UFO researchers that Ken Macdonald complained about in his June 2, 2018 AOL Newsribol article about Roswell, said that by the turn of the century (meaning in 2000), there would be hundreds of new witnesses clamoring for their place in the Roswell mythology. Turns out he was right (not about the mythology but about the new witnesses). People have been all over the place claiming to know something special or someone special or something important about the Roswell case.

Macdonald writes about the Roswell story as if this is something new but draws his information from the Roswell Daily Record article published in 1947. He even includes the irrelevant tale of Dan Wilmot, a Roswell resident who saw something on July 2, 1947. That Wilmot made the report about a craft in the sky doesn’t necessarily mean that what he saw was what was responsible for the debris found by W.W. “Mack” Brazel in early July 1947.

What annoyed me first here was this idea that the alien spacecraft was spying on our testing of nuclear weapons, according to what Macdonald wrote. Of course, those of us who can think beyond the end of a sentence realize the flaw in this theory. The first atomic explosion took place in July 1945, with two more in Japan in August 1945… So, if it was atomic explosions that grabbed the aliens’ attention, wouldn’t they have gone to Japan rather than New Mexico? There had been more explosions there.

And since we know the speed of light, and even if we grant the alien ability to spot these brief flashes of very bright light on the Earth’s surface, from where do the aliens originate? Even granting them Faster-than-Light travel, the light from those detonations had only been traveling for two years. Do the aliens have an outpost in our Solar System? Maybe on that ninth planet out in the Kuiper Belt somewhere that some astronomers claim is there?

But what really annoys me is that we have another, new but unidentified, witness to the bodies from the Roswell crash. Oh, he

Nope. Not the real creature, just a model
made for the ShowTime Movie, Roswell.

didn’t see them in New Mexico, but in Ohio, sort of like Philip Corso didn’t see them in New Mexico but in Kansas.

According to this story (and please don’t tell it’s been around for a couple of years because I know that) Raymond Szymanski, who says he worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as an “engineer and high-level researcher,” for 39 years, is the man behind this tale. He said that he was privy to some of the biggest and darkest secrets floating around the base which included the cover up of the Roswell crash.

He, himself, saw underground tunnels and chambers under the base, and this was where the material, and by material, I mean the craft and bodies recovered at Roswell, were stored. Now, he didn’t see the Roswell stuff, only these secret tunnels and chambers and given the history of Wright-Pat, and the paranoia of the Cold War, wouldn’t underground shelters and tunnels be something you’d expect? A purpose other than hiding alien bodies I mean, but I digress.

Szymanski tells of a friend, Al, who spilled the beans to him. Szymanski, according to what he has said, was a “young co-op student barely in his first week” and was let in on the secret… Security

Obviously, the gate to Wright-
Patterson AFB.

clearances take a while to complete, so this is an amazing breach of military etiquette, but I’ll ignore that because it really doesn’t make a lot of difference here.

He talked of a small group of 10,000 people that he had now joined. I don’t know if all 10,000 were at Wright-Pat or scattered among research facilities around the country… anyway, that’s a lot of people in on the secret and not exactly a small group.

But here’s the deal with this tale. We don’t know who Al is. We just have the first name and a suggestion that he was an important man or scientist. And we have Szymanski’s claim that “everyone” he talked to about this over the years didn’t deny the rumors… No one suggested he was out of his mind, but according to him, he has no smoking gun.

So, here we are, with another man claiming some sort of inside knowledge about the Roswell crash but unlike so many others, he admits that he hasn’t seen the bodies or the craft, only been told about it by people he finds to be reliable. But how many times have we been down that road only to learn that the sources for the information are not credible? I’m not even going to bother naming the names because those who visit here on a regular basis, or who have read Roswell in the 21^st Century, know how many have fallen to increased scrutiny.

No, right now I’m not buying this and I don’t really know why AOL Newsribol thought it necessary to dredge up this tale again. It is clear that the story was based on newspaper articles and press releases and that the writer did very little if anything to verify the information. That’s left, I guess, to we self-styled UFO researchers. Too bad so much is ignored by self-styled investigative journalists.

The Nuns Diaries and the Anatomy of an Investigation

As I was looking for something else, I stumbled across a diary page that had been given to me some twenty years ago. It was one of the very few documents that suggested that what fell outside of Roswell was something alien or that was what I had been told it meant. The two entries that were relevant said, “7-4-47 Object down – 2317 – Radar Target Gone,” and “7-5-47 Found Wreckage 0200…”

Diary page suggesting the UFO crash.

I also interviewed a former member of the 1395^th MP Company who had been stationed in Roswell in July 1947. Leo Spear told me on June 3, 1994, that he was a PVT E2 (according to him but the Yearbook identifies him as a PFC) in July 1947, but that he had been with the military police company. He had not been assigned to guard duty involving any of the material recovered, but did talk about it with his friends who had been involved. He said, “…it was the next morning when they came in with a cock and bull story… they said, ‘You know what? They brought in some stuff from a UFO. And that it had crashed north of Roswell.’”

Yes, he did say UFO but then, in 1994, that is not surprising and I would suspect that in 1947 they had said flying saucer. To me it wasn’t much of a problem. The important point here is that he said that he thought they were crazy until the next day when he saw in the newspaper that they had picked up pieces of a flying saucer. He realized that it wasn’t a cock and bull story, but that something had happened.

There was also Corporal E.L. Pyles, who said that while he and a friend were out walking on the base when they saw something streak across the sky. He did say that it was in a downward motion, and according to the information he had given Don Schmitt, this was during the first week or so of July 1947.

This fits, generally, with what William Woody had said. Woody told me that it was a white light with red streaks in it. He said that it glowed brightly and unlike the other meteors he’d seen, it took a long time to fall. Given what we had been told, and with the documentation that we had been given, we dated this to July 4, 1947. Woody did say that a few days after seeing the object he and his father had attempted to go find it, but the roads to the west of the main highway north out of town were blocked by military vehicles. This helped establish the time frame for the sighting.

The nun’s story came from a man who said he was a former officer in the Special Forces, meaning the Green Berets, and he had talked with a nun or a former nun in Roswell, who had seen a diary enter. According to what we were told, the nuns’ diary entries dated the event to July 4, sometime prior to midnight. I believed, back in the early 1990s that Don Schmitt, chasing the diaries, had actually seen them. He says now that he did not.

Look where we are on this. I have a document that was allegedly created in 1947

Leo Spear from the
509th Yearbook.

giving me times and a date. I have testimony from two men who saw an object in the air in the right time frame. I have testimony from another man who reported that friends in the 1395^th MP Company had talked about recovery of a flying saucer and was able to date it in the right time frame. And I have others who mention the nuns’ diaries, at least two of whom claimed to have seen them, giving me a time and a date for their observations. All this seems to be pretty strong evidence… but let’s now look at it with our different perspective of twenty years.

The document was given to me with instructions not to show it around because it was still considered classified, so I didn’t mention it. I thought that it was unnecessary because of the other evidence. That document, unfortunately, came from Frank Kaufmann and it is not the only document he had altered or created. He supplied other documents that seemed to corroborate his tale, including his official Army discharge papers that listed him as a master sergeant with some specialized intelligence training. We all now know that many of those documents had been altered or created out of nothing at all. When we received his official records from the Army, we learned that he had been a staff sergeant and his training had been as an administrative specialist and a clerk/typist. There was nothing to suggest he had ever been involved in any intelligence functions, and no reason to believe the documents he gave me had not been created by him to support his tales. The diary page was just one more fake and that the supporting evidence could be rejected.

Corporal Pyles was reported by Karl Pflock as being unable to remember what month he had seen the object, though he did put it in 1947. In what I think of as an incredibly inept bit of copy editing, in the paragraph that followed the one in which Pyles couldn’t give a month of the sighting, he said, according to Pflock, “A ‘few days later,’ he saw the ‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer’ story… and he wondered if what he and his friend had seen had anything to do with it.”

That seemed to date the event to the first week in July, just as the information from Leo Spear had done. Spear, of course, hadn’t seen anything, and Pyles had just seen a streak of light in the night sky. Pyles told Pflock that it was before midnight, which is an interesting detail for him to remember when he had suggested he couldn’t even remember the month.

Pflock, in his book, suggested that William Woody might have seen the same object as that seen by Dan Wilmot at about 10:00 p.m. on July 2 when the Wilmots had their sighting as reported in the Roswell Daily Record. There is nothing to tie the reports together, other than both Wilmot and Woody said the object was moving toward the north. Of course, there is nothing to suggest that what Woody saw was what crashed either other than proximity in time. But it does add an element of documentation to the whole case, even if we don’t know if the object seen was the one that crashed or even anything of alien origin.

Finally, we return to the nuns’ diaries. As near as I can tell, based on the credibility of the witnesses, meaning that the Green Beret officer was not, and I saw nothing to suggest the nun or former nun was what she claimed to be, the diaries do not exist. I was told about them, told what they said, and was told by some that they had seen the diaries themselves. Given the other information I had at the time, there was no reason to reject the evidence. With the collapse of some of that information, I simply do not believe this anymore.

So, where is this once strong bit of the Roswell UFO crash tale? Well, the documentation is reduced to a newspaper clipping about Dan Wilmot that might have nothing to do with the crash. Both the diary page submitted by Frank Kaufmann and the alleged diary pages written by the nuns are either faked or nonexistent. Since the nuns were never interviewed and their diaries never found, anything said about them can be properly rejected. It is as if it never existed because it probably never did.

On the other hand, we have two men who saw something strange in the sky in early July 1947. The descriptions offered, decades after the fact, match generally, which means it could be the same object. It was traveling generally to the north, and the debris found by Mack Brazel was to the north of Roswell. We can suggest that this is the object that crashed, but the links are fairly weak, but at least they are something.

This once strong aspect of the case has been reduced to some testimony offered decades after the fact, a newspaper clipping, and an MP who remembered his pals talking about picking up pieces of a flying saucer but who had seen nothing himself. It is just not very persuasive evidence when stripped to its bare bones and we are left with very little to bolster the case.

The End of MJ-12?

My plan had been to hold off on this until later, but with some suggesting there is still life in MJ-12, I thought I would attempt to drive a nail into this particular coffin. It is clear, based on some early research, that MJ-12 is a hoax created in the early 1980s, probably by Bill Moore and Richard Doty.

Here’s what we all seem to know. The information contained in the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) reflects the state of UFO crash research in the early 1980s. Bill Moore told a number of people, and you can find their names on the Internet, that he was thinking of creating a "Roswell-style document" in an attempt to smoke out additional witnesses. Moore had said that he had taken the investigation as far as he could.

By this time it was clear to many that the Barney Barnett (who died in 1969 long before he was interviewed) connection to Roswell was weak at best. Barnett, who told his tale of seeing a crashed UFO on the Plains of San Agustin, did not have a date associated with it. Barnett was important to the earliest Roswell investigations because he mentioned seeing alien bodies and that was the only mention of bodies. That made it clear the event was extraterrestrial in nature.

The connection was drawn by J. F. "Fleck" Danley who had been Barnett’s boss in 1947, and Danley said that he had heard the tale directly from Barnett. Pushed by Moore, Danley thought the date of this story might have been 1947, and based on sighting in Roswell on July 2, Moore and others assumed the crash to have happened on July 2. This sighting, by Dan Wilmot, has little relevance to the Roswell case other than Wilmot lived in Roswell and it happened on July 2, 1947. There is no reason to connect the sighting to the crash.

When I talked to Danley it was clear that he had no real idea of when Barnett had mentioned the UFO crash. It could have been 1947, but if I pushed, I could have gotten him to come up with another date. Moore knew of the shaky nature of the Danley date.

To make it worse, I learned, in the 1990s, from Alice Knight, that Ruth Barnett had kept a diary for 1947. It is clear from that document that the crash could not have taken place on July 2, if Barnett was there. In fact, there is nothing in the diary to suggest he had seen anything extraordinary or had been involved in anything that would have been upsetting. In other words, the only document about Barney Barnett that we could find suggested that if he had seen a UFO crash, it didn’t happen in 1947.

Of course, in the early 1980s, Moore wouldn’t have known about the diary, but he did know how he had gotten Danley to give him the 1947 date. He would have known that it wasn’t true and that the Barnett story had nothing to do with the Roswell UFO crash.

This is important because it explains why there was no mention of the Plains crash in the Eisenhower Briefing Document. Moore knew that those on the inside would know that the Barnett story did not fit into the scenario. Moore left it out because it would expose the MJ-12 hoax for what it was to those who knew the truth.

And now we come to the other crash mentioned in the EBD. This is the Del Rio crash that was dated in the EBD as 1950. This is the story being told by Robert B. Willingham, who it was claimed, was a retired Air Force colonel who had seen the crash. Because he was a retired colonel, his story had credibility with those in the UFO community. I believed it for that very reason. A retired Air Force colonel would not be making up something like this.

W. Todd Zechel, a UFO researcher of limited ability, in pawing through the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena files, found a newspaper clipping about Willingham and his alleged UFO crash. Back in the mid-1970s, when Zechel found the clipping, no one was taking much notice of such stories. They were considered, at best, to be mistakes and at worst, to be hoaxes. But Zechel believed the tale, and tracked down Willingham. At Zechel’s insistence, Willingham signed an affidavit about the crash, proving to many that this was a solid case. Even the Center for UFO Studies included the Willingham story on the LP (vinyl) record they produced of interesting UFO sightings.

Moore knew of this story because Zechel had told him. In Moore’s book, The Roswell Incident, he devotes a brief mention to the case which establishes the link between Zechel, Willingham and Moore. More to the point, Moore believed the story for the same reason that the rest of us did. Willingham was a retired colonel.

The thinking is easy to follow. Del Rio is a real crash, but Moore didn’t have all the details. Those belonged to Zechel and what he had learned from Willingham. But Moore believed this to be real and if those on the inside were going to believe MJ-12, he had to mention this crash. Without the details, he simply added a single paragraph to the EBD that suggested the craft had been nearly incinerated upon impact, which, in reality, wasn’t that far from what Willingham originally said.

So, the MJ-12 document, using the information developed by Zechel and supplied by Willingham, said, "On 06 December, 1950, (sic) a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El-Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally (sic) incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study."

The situation, then, in the early 1980s was that Roswell was a real crash, the Plains might be but the date was wrong, Aztec was a hoax, as proven in repeated investigations, and Del Rio was real because there was an Air Force officer who said so. Which, of course, explains why both the Plains and Aztec were left out and Del Rio was included.

I learned, as I was working on Crash – When UFOs Fall from the Sky, that no one had checked on Willingham’s credentials. I became suspicious when the date of the crash shifted from 1950 to 1955. I asked, but no one had ever looked into Willingham’s background. Apparently everyone thought someone else had done it, most believing that Zechel had conducted that research. The whole case hinged on the credibility of Willingham.

But Willingham had not been an officer, had not been in the Air Force, had not been a fighter pilot and had not been in a position to see a UFO crash. In fact, though I didn’t find the newspaper clipping, I did find a one paragraph report in the February/March 1968 issue of Skylook that gave the crash date as 1948, and suggested that there had been three objects. Nearly everything about that original case had changed, some times more than once. It was clear that Willingham had invented his Air Force career, was not a retired colonel, and had served just 13 or 14 months from December 1945 to January 1948 as a low-ranking enlisted soldier.

If Willingham, as the sole witness to the crash had invented the tale, then there was no Del Rio crash and the MJ-12 documents, or rather the EBD, was a fake. But in the early 1980s, Moore didn’t know this, most of the UFO community didn’t know this, and Willingham was still talking about the 1950 date.

Yes, I know what the answer to this will be. What relevance does Willingham have to MJ-12? Two separate issues. Except, they aren’t. There is no other witness, document, indication, suggestion, or mention of the Del Rio case without Willingham. If not for his discussion about the case in 1968, if not for Zechel’s interview of him in the 1970s, there would be no mention of a Del Rio UFO crash anywhere. That it is mentioned in the MJ-12 EBD, and we can draw a line from Willingham to Zechel to Moore, that suggests all we need to know about this. There was no Del Rio UFO crash and if there was none, then it shouldn’t have been mentioned in the Eisenhower Briefing Document.

If we look at the state of UFO research today, we realize that much of what was said in the EBD about Roswell was not quite right and the information about Del Rio completely wrong. The more we learn about the events in Roswell, and the more we learn about the lack of detail for Del Rio, the better the case against MJ-12 becomes.

Couple the other problems to this, the lack of provenance, the typographical errors, the incorrect dating format, and the anachronistic information, then the only conclusion possible is that there is no MJ-12. There never was, except for a 1980 unpublished novel written by the late Bob Pratt with the assistance of Bill Moore and Richard Doty. The only question left is how long are we going to have to listen to the nonsense that is MJ-12.