Chasing Footnotes - Kelly Hopkinsville, Part Two

 

This latest started as a “Chasing Footnotes” segment in which a paper about critical thinking included a short note on the Kelly-Hopkinsville alien encounter. The footnote suggested that the witnesses had been drinking and linked to a book by Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher. That book actually said the opposite. I wrote to one of the paper’s authors and he responded by saying the mistake had been corrected. You can, of course, read all that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/08/chasing-footnotes-kelly-hopkinsville.html

However, in the comments section, there were those who didn’t believe the story and thought it nonsense. I have to admit that the thought had crossed my mind as well. It is an incredible story that seemed to make little sense. John Steiger wrote that the case had been carried as “unidentified” by the Air Force. That didn’t seem right to me and in fact, the Air Force didn’t even carry it as a real case. It was one of their ‘info only” with no real evaluation.

John wrote back, saying, “I'm sorry if the information from Mr. Clark's UFO Encyclopedia is inaccurate, but this is what the latest edition reports. In any event, Kelly-Hopkinsville remains as an intriguing encounter yet to be fully and adequately explained.”

Jerome Clark (Jerry) wrote in his UFO Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition, “Yet even the Air Force, not known to lend a sympathetic ear to reports of UFO landings and humanoids, lists the case in its “Unidentified” file.”

Well, now there is a problem. As noted, the Air Force doesn’t provide much commentary on the case, other than to make a big deal about how they didn’t investigate it. This is a fine hair to split because there was an investigation but it wasn’t made by a member of Blue Book. It was carried out by a reserve officer on temporary duty at Campbell Air Force Base, Kentucky. He heard about it while driving into work and contacted his superiors who told him to look into it. Not an official investigation for Blue Book, but an investigation by an Air Force officer, nonetheless.

The Hopkinsville Folder in Project Blue Book.

Brad Sparks had compiled a long list of Blue Book Unidentified cases, using lists originally created by me, by Don Berliner, and other sources. The Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting is on the list. However, Brad had expanded the list by adding cases the Air Force had labeled as something else but that didn’t seem to be explained by the Air Force investigation. Brad’s is not an official list of Air Force Unidentified case but is a valuable resource.

Allen Hynek, in his book, The UFO Experience, wrote, "Still, the case is carried in Blue Book files as 'Unidentified'." This is probably where Jerry got the idea that the case was listed as “Unidentified.”

Here’s where we are on this aspect of the case. The Air Force, technically, did not investigate. They dispatched a reserve officer who had called in after hearing a news broadcast about the sighting. His statement, which appears in the Blue Book file is dated 1957, or two years after the event. You can find the Air Force documents on the case here:

https://www.fold3.com/image/6972750

The inspiration for contacting Major Albert and getting a written statement, was the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting was about to blast into the public mindset. Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher were preparing a long report on the case. This new activity, or interest in the sighting was, by coincidence, just a few weeks before the Levelland events took place.

What we can say is this. The Air Force did, technically, investigate the landing and did unofficially check it out in 1955. In fact, those at Blue Book went out of their way to deny an official investigation. However, they do have a file on it, but it is not part of the main index of cases. It does show up as “Additional reported sightings not cases".

The page from the Blue Book Index that shows this was not a case.

The argument, I guess, degenerates to this. Was it labeled as “unidentified” by the Air Force and the answer is, “No.” Did the Air Force label is as a “Hoax”? Again, the answer is, “No.” Did Allen Hynek write that the case was “Unidentified”? “Yes.” That wasn’t the official explanation by the Air Force, however.

And that’s where we are. The Blue Book ignored the case until they were forced to investigate… but it wasn’t an official Blue Book investigation, though that is really just a matter of semantics, and more of a lie than anything else.

I will not offer an opinion on the case other than to say that it was one of the strangest to be reported and there currently is no good terrestrial explanation for it.

A special thanks to Brad Sparks for helping me sort all this out.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Fallout from February 27, 2019

Over the last several days some of my colleagues have suggested that I was overly harsh in my interview with Christopher Montgomery. They seemed to think that my challenging of his statements and pressing him on his lack of response to some of my questions was too mean. I should have toned down the rhetoric. I say, “Crapola.”

The interview was inspired after I learned that he had told Rob McConnell on his X-Zone radio show that, “…he’s [Randle] written books about UFOs and yet you can find red herrings in his book too. For example, he believes that the aliens recovered at Roswell were crash test dummies, and crash test dummies didn’t come along in the 50s.”

I asked for a source on this and he responded, “No comment.”

But here’s the deal. I never said anything like that to anyone. In fact, had I said something like that, I would have said “anthropomorphic dummies,” which was what the Air Force had claimed. But the real point is that I have never suggested that bodies recovered near Roswell were either crash test dummies or anthropomorphic dummies.

I thought that my categorically denying any such statement would give him pause, and maybe think that his sources were in error, whoever they might be. But, no, he provided no source for the statement but wouldn’t retract or amend it.

In his book, Montgomery wrote, “Randle devoted an entire chapter in his book The Plains of San Augustin, New Mexico to debunk Anderson.”

Of course, while I never wrote a book with that title and I would have spelled San Agustin correctly, I do believe I know where this originated. Back when the Gerald Anderson nonsense surfaced, there was a bit of a controversy over his reliability. CUFOS and FUFOR arranged a conference in Chicago in February 1992 to discuss all aspects of this. We spent two days going over the information. The conference was attended by Stan Friedman, Don Berliner, Mark Rodeghier, Fred Whiting, Tom Carey, Don Schmitt, Michael Swords and me. Conspicuous by his absence was Gerald Anderson, who was invited, expenses paid, but he failed to make it for some rather lame reason.

Participants in the Plains of San Agustin Conference. Left to right, Kevin Randle, Don Schmitt, Tom Carey
Mark Rodeghier, Mike Swords, Fred Whiting. Standing, Don Berliner and Stan Friedman.

Each side was to prepare a written statement outlining their perspectives, limited to 25 pages. Friedman and Berliner wrote theirs and Carey, Schmitt and I provided ours. Our commentary suggested that there were great holes in the Anderson story, and we learned later that Anderson had a habit of embellishing his accomplishments and that he had identified his high school anthropology teacher as the leader of the archaeologists who had stumbled onto the alien ship. This was called, The Plains of San Agustin Controversy, July 1947, edited by George Eberhart, and published jointly by CUFOS and FUFOR. For those who wish to read all this for themselves, see:

http://www.cufos.org/books/Plains_of_San_AgustinR.pdf

So, his comment was wrong, didn’t acknowledge the context in which that chapter was written or by whom, failed to note our 184 footnotes that provided our sources, and that subsequent events had suggested that Anderson’s tale was not credible. Even Don Berliner, who had been arguing that Anderson should be believed realized his mistake. Both he and Friedman published a statement in the January 1993 MUFON UFO Journal, issue No. 297, explaining they had lost faith in Anderson as a source. Friedman, oddly, later repudiated that statement. The note signed by both Friedman and Berliner, said:

…Don Berliner and Stanton Friedman, authors of Crash at Corona (Paragon House, New York, 1992), no longer have confidence in the testimony of Gerald Anderson, who claims to have stumbled upon a crash site with members of his family. Anderson admitted falsifying a document, and so his testimony about finding wreckage of a crashed flying saucer near the Plains of San Augustin [sic] in western New Mexico and then being escorted out by the U.S. military, can no longer be seen as sufficiently reliable.

The authors regret the need to take this step, but feel it is absolutely necessary if they are to stand behind their book and subsequent research into what continues to be the most important story of the millennium. This does not mean they feel there was no crash at the Plains of San Augustin; there is considerable impressive testimony to such an event. Nor does it mean that everything reported by Gerald Anderson is without value.

Dennis Stacy, editor of the Journal at the time added his own note. “Although it strongly suggests it!”

For those interested in how some of this finally played out, though it has little real relevance to the discussion of Montgomery’s book, John Carpenter wrote an article about this in the March 1993 issue of The MUFON UFO Journal entitled “Gerald Anderson: Disturbing Revelations.”

Although this too is of no real relevance here, Anderson also claimed to have been a member of the elite Navy SEALs and provided some documents to prove it. However, the SEALs, who do not like having men claim to have been a SEAL but who were not, put his name on their Hall of Shame list. These are men who claim to have been SEALs but were not.

Continuing, after a fashion, with this, Montgomery wrote, “Stan Friedman took up his [Anderson] cause and published details about the site of the actual wreckage recovered at the arroyo on the Plains of San Augustin [sic], near Corona, New Mexico. Randle never mentioned the actual location of the wreckage, which I believe he had knowledge of.”

While it is true that Friedman supported and still supports the Anderson tale, the crash site Anderson identified was on the far side of the Plains of San Agustin, not in some arroyo near Corona. I’m not sure what it means that I had knowledge of the actual location that I never mentioned. The only site that isn’t in dispute is the debris field located by Mack Brazel. Other sites have been suggested, where the craft and bodies were found, but there is no solid information confirming any of them.

He wrote, in another attack on my integrity, “I believe Randle is probably a shill for the Air Force in a campaign to debunk UFOs.”

On my radio show, he did suggest that I was an unwitting participant in it but made that claim again. I wasn’t acting on orders, but my actions suggested I was an unwitting dupe. I wondered if researching a sighting and following the evidence to a conclusion was acting as a shill. I mentioned, specifically, the Chiles-Whitted sighting of July1948. I’ve discussed that on this blog which you can read here (if you wish to understand this):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/01/chiles-and-whitted-revisited.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/12/history-channel-project-blue-book-and.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/01/chileswhitted-and-skepticism.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/04/meteorite-men-and-ufos.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/03/chiles-whitted-turbulence-and-ed-ruppelt.html

The point is that the evidence, as we now understand it, suggests a mundane explanation for their sighting. I wondered if, as we applied better information and research to a case, and found a logical solution, we shouldn’t publish that because of what the information said. Aren’t we obligated to share all information, no matter where that information might take us? Isn’t that point of investigation? To learn the truth. And if I publish that truth, how does that make me a shill, unwitting or otherwise, for the Air Force?

I had other, difficult questions for him about things I had found in his book. I suggested that Philip Corso might not have been the most honest of sources. We can go through his various tales at length, but it was clear that Montgomery had no real insight into Corso’s background or stories. He just accepted all that Corso said as if it was true. You can read about Corso here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/01/philip-corso-and-day-after-roswell-again.html

Finally, I will note that I invited him back to the show, to finish up where we left off when he disconnected. He thought it a good idea, but wanted to read a prepared statement and wanted a list of the topics we would discuss. Given it was my show, I said I wouldn’t allow the statement, realizing that if he was clever, he could have made the points without having to read them. He could just inject them into the conversation.

At his request, I also sent a long list of items I thought we could discuss. But I also mentioned that the first time he said, “No comment,” the connection would be severed. I would ask the questions and if he didn’t want to answer, then he would have to find someway to say that other than, “No comment.” I thought it only fair that he provide the source for some of the allegations he had slung at me.

But after writing that he thought it was a good idea, he never answered any of my follow up emails. I don’t know why, if he was confident in his information and believed his book was an accurate representation of the UFO field, he decided to no longer communicate with me. I was willing to engage in the conversation but he wasn’t. He had bailed on the first… though he said his connection was disrupted, the information in the studio was it was a disconnection rather than a service interruption. In other words, he hung up.

So, if you still believe I was too harsh, this might provide some insight to that. I’m not sure why I’m subjected to these attacks and misrepresentations of my position or why I find myself having to explain that my investigations were not influenced by the Air Force. I have tried to provide the best information available, have corrected errors that I have made in the past, and continue to research carefully. If that makes me a shill for the Air Force, then I suggest it makes many others shills for the Air Force as well. Careful research should not be attacked because you don’t like the outcome. It should be embraced as we all search for answers.

Chasing Footnotes -The Socorro Case

As anyone who visits here regularly, you know that I chase footnotes. I sometimes try to find specific instances to make the case, but when I search without a known destination, it seems to be an impossible task. Instead, I find the bad footnotes by accident. This is just something that cannot be forced.

Lonnie Zamora

As you all also know, I have been looking into the symbol that Lonnie Zamora reported seeing on the side of the landed UFO. That research has bled into other areas, including the idea that other members of the Socorro Police Department or the New Mexico State Police saw the same object as Zamora. In the Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence compiled by Don Berliner, Marie Galbraith and Antonio Huneeus and “presented” by CUFOS, FUFOR and MUFON, in December, 1995, I read the short segment on the Socorro case. They wrote, “At this time, Zamora was joined by a police sergeant [Chavez] who watched the craft fly away into the distance.”

This is an argument, that Chavez saw the object, that has been made here by David Rudiak and one that Ray Stanford as well as Ben Moss and Tony Angiola shared during the interviews on my X-Zone Broadcast Network radio show. The links can be found in the postings for those programs. It is not this argument, that Chavez saw the object, which I’m concerned with here, but with the footnote about where this information was found or where it could be verified. According to Berliner, Galbraith and Hunees, this was a “Written statement by Lonnie Zamora to Project Blue Book, 1964; reprinted in Steiger, Brad, ed. Project Blue Book, ibid.”

In the last weeks I have been through the Blue Book files several times. I have discussed this idea of other police witnesses, both privately with a number of people and publicly on this blog. I have a copy of Steiger’s book and a complete copy of the Blue Book file on the case. Nowhere in the statement by Zamora does it suggest that the police sergeant arrived in time to see the UFO as it disappeared in the distance. In fact, Zamora in that statement said:

As I was calling Nep [a police radio operator], I could still see the object. The object seemed to lift up slowly, and to “get small” in the distance very fast. It seemed to just clear Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon mountain. It disappeared as it went over the mountains. It had no flame whatsoever as it was traveling over the ground and made no smoke or noise…

Zamora said that he then went down to where the craft had landed and saw that one of the bushes was still smoking. He then said:

Gave directions to Nep Lopez at radio and to Sgt. M.S. Chavez to get there. Went down to where the object was (had been), and I noted the bush was burning in several places. At that time, I heard Sgt. Chavez calling me on radio for my location, and I returned to my car, told him he was looking at me. Then Sgt. Chavez came up and asked me what the trouble was, because I was sweating and he told me I was white, very pale. I asked the Sergeant to see what I saw, and that was the burning bush. Then Sgt. Chavez and I went to the spot, and Sgt. Chavez pointed out the tracks.

It is clear from Zamora’s statement in the Blue Book files and in Steiger’s book, that Chavez didn’t arrive until after the UFO had disappeared in the distance. Now we really don’t have to go through the arguments again about how Chavez did arrive in time to see it in the sky. What I’m saying here is that the sources quoted for the information do not support that idea. We can argue about other sources, but in this very limited case, those additional sources are irrelevant because they weren’t cited. The sources quoted do not support the statement, and that is all that is relevant here.

Chasing Footnotes - Roswell and Original Sources

This is another of those posts that chases footnotes and though it begins with Richard Dolan, he is merely the starting point and this isn’t a criticism of his scholarship… well, maybe a little bit but you’ll understand as we get deeper into this. As an aside, and one that is not directed at Dolan here, I wonder how it is that some lies seem to mean nothing in our world of the UFO and simple mistakes are presented as false claims, and yes, this should become clear later as well.

Richard Dolan. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Dolan provides a brief summary of the Roswell case in his book, and footnotes many of the comments he makes. He describes for us some of the testimony of Barbara Dugger. Dolan wrote:

Barbara Dugger was the granddaughter of Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox. She claimed that her grandmother, Inez (the wife of George Wilcox), said that after the incident, military police told the Wilcox couple that the entire family would be killed if they ever talked about it. Inez said George Wilcox had gone out to the site, saw a big burned area, debris and “four space beings” with big heads and suits “like silk.” One of the beings was alive. According to Dugger: “if she [Inez] said it happened, it happened.”

I have nothing to object to here. The information provided, is what Dugger told Don Schmitt and me when we interviewed her. It is the footnote that is somewhat annoying. The footnote takes us to Stan Friedman and Don Berliner’s Crash at Corona. There they tell us that I interviewed Miss Barbara Dugger in early 1991. The question is, shouldn’t Dolan have acknowledged the original source of the information, which clearly he knew because that information is in his source. And isn’t the original source, that is the interview that Don and I conducted, a better source than one that quotes me rather than us. Or, in other words, shouldn’t Dolan have referred to our original work rather than the intermediate report of Friedman and Berliner that used us.

Okay, that’s not really egregious. He did provide the information that takes you, eventually, to the original source. And, as we delve into this, we’ll find that Dolan quoted one of the sources he had, though a little research would have revealed the original source which is a better source than those repeating information.

What does this mean?

Dolan describes what Bill Brazel had said, which as you all know was a description of some of the debris he picked up, that his father had been held in Roswell for a number of days and then soldiers had shown up a few days after he had talked about finding the debris while in Corona. Dolan’s account, though short, is fairly accurate. He does misspell Mack Brazel’s name as Mac, but we all did that until Tom Carey learned that it had a “K” at the end. The footnote takes us to Friedman and Berliner again.

Bill Brazel. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Here's where the problem develops. They wrote, “According to his son, Bill Jr., Mac never felt like he had done anything special.” They then quote from an interview with Bill in some detail. The problem is that neither Friedman nor Berliner were at that interview. It was conducted by Don Schmitt and me on February 19, 1989, in Carrizozo, New Mexico and was recorded on audiotape. The quotes appear in our book, UFO Crash at Roswell and there is no credit nor attribution for the information given by Friedman and Berliner. Dolan would have no way of learning the original source of the interview so the trail ends there… unless, of course, he had access to our book, which is cited in the footnotes in that same section and is mentioned in his bibliography.

And to make it worse, if possible, Friedman alters a portion of the quote for no reason other than to make it fit with his brief structure and to help prop up the failing Gerald Anderson tale. Friedman, quoting us, quoting Brazel, wrote, “I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong, a real nice guy.

Stan Friedman Photo copyright Kevin Randle.

He had a [black] sergeant with him.”

The trouble is, Brazel never said the sergeant was black, and the tape of the interview proves that he never said it. Later Friedman would claim that Brazel had used a racially charged word to describe the sergeant as a way of alibiing his change to our interview. Once again, I have the original tape and Brazel said nothing like that.

There is another point in which Dolan writes about Roswell, and mentioned the testimony of Robert Smith. Dolan briefly describes crates that had been built to transport some of the wreckage out of Roswell. He specifically mentions Robert Smith, and the footnote takes us back to Friedman and Berliner. There is a long quote from Smith in their book and according to them, “In a 1991 interview, he [Robert Smith] described his involvement.”

That’s a neat piece of writing that implies they were there for the interview without saying anything of the kind. What they don’t say is that Don and I interviewed, on videotape, Robert Smith and neither of them were there. The quotes come from our work with neither credit nor attribution.

These are just a few of the examples and I know what you’re thinking, “What difference does it make now?” Well, first I just came across a statement from Friedman saying that my work can’t be trusted because I write science fiction (as do how many others who also investigate UFOs…), that Anderson was responding to what he thought was an unfair characterization of him as a liar and that I’m an anti-abduction propagandist. But the great irony in all this is that prior to the publication of UFO Crash at Roswell, Friedman wrote a letter to our AVON BOOKS editor, John Douglas on June 11, 1990, and falsely claimed, “if once again there are many factual mistakes, flights of fancy, lifting my research much of which remains unpublished.”

(For those interested, Dick Hall in the May/June 1993 issue of the International UFO Reporter wrote that, “Randle alleged that Friedman and others, apparently acting in concert, had attempted to interfere with publication of the book UFO CRASH AT ROSWELL (then in preparation) by contacting the publisher, AVON BOOKS, making charges of plagiarism and generally impugning Randle’s character and integrity. I asked Randle for documentation, which he provided. I asked Friedman for an explanation and he never replied.”)

What happened here, as evidenced by the footnotes provided by Dolan, and by reading the information in the Friedman and Berliner book, was that they actually lifted the research conducted by Don and me and published it as their own without reference to us. In the wording of the statements… “According to his son, Bill Jr., Mac never felt like he had done anything special,” and “In a 1991 interview, he [Robert Smith] described his involvement,” they have not acknowledged the source of the information, or to use Friedman’s words to the AVON editor, they were “lifting my research …” Ironic isn’t it?

Friedman also talked of “flights of fancy,” which is a way of saying inventing imaginative fictitious scenarios, like suggesting the sergeant who visited Brazel was black for no other reason to make it fit in with the Glenn Dennis nonsense and to prop up Gerald Anderson by suggesting corroboration where none existed.

I was going to continue in this vein because there are many examples of these sorts of attacks on me. I know that while I was serving in Iraq, there were those inside the UFO community who questioned whether or not I was really there. Unlike some who have claimed extensive military service, I can actually prove what I say.

The point here is just that periodically I grow tired of the attacks because I happen to disagree with some of the nonsense being sprouted in the UFO community. The attacks are personal rather than an attempt to refute the evidence and when all else fails, just label me a debunker because we don’t have to deal with the truth of the statements.

And I sometimes wonder why, when we have shown that certain points of view are wrong, horribly wrong and laughably wrong, it seems to make no difference as long as that person has a message that people want to hear. It makes no difference if the message is filled with poor research, bad evidence, leaps of logic that are not justified by the information or who are caught in outright lies, people just ignore that, as long as the message fits into their belief structure. I had always thought that people wanted the truth, but obviously it is only their “truth” they wish to hear and that is why we still have people telling us the alien autopsy is real and some believe MJ-12 authentic. It would seem to me that when the evidence is stacked up, that should end the discussion but in the world of the UFO that never happens.

So, I chased a few footnotes here, saw that Richard Dolan hadn’t done the best job of sourcing his material (and sometimes it simply wasn’t possible for him to do that given the sources he used) and that sometimes the information was correct but those claiming to have done the research had “borrowed” it instead. I think we all now have a different perspective of some of this research and rather than respond to the issues raised here, I’ll bet we’ll all have to hear about my “day job” as a science fiction writer as if that somehow negates the points I’ve made. I just wish the UFO community would hold everyone to the same standards rather than personally attacking those who might have a different perspective.

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.

The Decline and Fall of Ufology

I think that the high point in Ufology was July 1997 when the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash was celebrated. I think that the low point, probably the lowest since June 1947 and Arnold’s sighting was May 5, 2015 when the fiasco of the Not Roswell Slides was presented to the world. This is underscored with many of the UFO documentaries that now populate the cable channel landscape.

The one that I’m thinking of, which I mentioned in another post that will probably annoy most of MUFON and the people in Kingman, Arizona, dealt partially with the

Kingman, Arizona, crash, the MJ-12 SOM 1-01, and a few other ancillary issues. It was the Kingman crash that caught my attention because I have done a great deal of research into this case and frankly, I believe it to be a hoax started by Arthur Stansel.

For those who wish to see an evolution of this case, or rather the evolution in my thinking about it see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/05/kingman-ufo-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/06/kingman-ufo-crash-revisited.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/05/kingman-ufo-crash-really.html

The point here is that Hangar 1 came up with some new information which may or may not have come from Stansel. It was not clear, at least to me, who the source was on this. In this new version, Stansel or someone reported that men in some sort of protective gear had entered the craft. They rushed out, all of them sick and vomiting, which, had I been on the scene would have been frightening. Why were they sick? Have I been contaminated? Is it fatal?

From that point they explained how the disk, whatever it was, had been floated down the Colorado River after retrieval. Kingman is about 90 miles south of Las Vegas and standing between Las Vegas and Kingman is the Hoover Dam. I’m not sure how they got the disc to the river and why they thought this was the best way to recover it, but that’s the claim.

Here’s the point. This case is virtually single witness. There are others who claim to have knowledge of it, but that all comes from hearing the story told by others. And Stansel is not a good witness. His educational background seems to be solid, friends who knew him believed him to be honest, and his assignments put him into the Kingman area, meaning simply he was working north of Las Vegas at the time, so he could have been involved.

But as you can read yourselves in those previous posts, he told a couple of versions of this tale. Some of what he said seems to discredit parts of his story. More importantly, he said that he had lied to the first investigators (who were teenagers with an interest in UFOs) and he said that when he drank, he tended to expand and embellish his stories.

To support the reality of the Kingman crash, they trotted out the SOM 1-01 which is supposed to be the MJ-12 Group Special Operations Manual. Oh, they mentioned frequently that it was controversial, but the language and the tone told us that the controversy was unimportant. The manual contained instructions about the recovery, retrieval and shipping of alien debris. It also suggests that these retrievals be covered by suggesting those in charge say that the debris was from a satellite… but, in 1954, when the manual was created, it didn’t say who had been launching these satellites. This is merely a single example of the flaws that surround the manual.

It struck me as odd that you’d use a controversial manual to support the case for an alien spacecraft crash which is also controversial. The manual arrived in the mail for Don Berliner who himself has said it was a hoax. There is no provenance for it and it violates some of the standards in place in 1954 for such documents. None of this makes any difference to the true believers because they know the manual is authentic.

Finally, to prove their case, they resorted to interviewing Cliff Stone as one of the whistleblowers about alien visitation. You can read about him here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/11/exopolitics.html

There is a follow up article about Stone from Dr. Michael Salla, but Stone sinks his own boat with his tales of derring-do in Vietnam. In one of those ridiculous tales he talks about how he would sneak out of the camp, crawling through the wire to engage the enemy on his own. This was a recipe for suicide. Stone served in Vietnam as a clerk and not a combat soldier.

The point is that the episode here was filled with information that was faulty, untrue, fabricated, unverified and unsupported by any facts. It was written in such a way as to suggest that while the authorities might deny it; those at MUFON were telling us all the truth. Just never mind that they had no real evidence for their truth and that their witnesses were less than credible.

And that is why Ufology is in rapid decline. It is not about the research, it is not about finding answers for the unexplained cases and no alien visitation does not answer all the questions… there are many answers.  This is about ratings and making money. When solid evidence for a solution of a case is presented, there are always those out there who will scream cover up, that those offering answers are in the employ of the CIA, the Air Force or even MJ-12 as a way of hiding the truth but these programs often ignore those explanations as they underscore the alien nature of the reports. Alternatives are not offered.

But nothing will change as long as there is an audience for the UFO documentaries that have no truth in them, an audience for speakers who are clearly inventing their tales and people who buy books that do not provide solid information. We are stuck in the dark ages and I don’t see us climbing into the light any time soon.

Oh, for those who can’t deduce what I meant here… Kingman is a hoax and the single first-hand witness said that he lied about the details. The SOM 1-01 manual is a hoax and it provides us with no useful information. Many of the whistleblowers who are invited to tell their tales simply don’t have the credentials they claimed, weren’t in the positions they claimed, or have exaggerated their knowledge. All of this creates the problems for those of us who are more interested in the truth than in validating our own belief structures.

Chasing Footnotes Again

When not bogged down in the Roswell Slides controversy, I sometimes engage in what I think of as chasing footnotes. One of the purposes of a footnote is to tell where the information originated so that the reader or others interested can review that source for reliability, competence, and any additional information that might be relevant. Too often I find that the footnotes do none of that leaving us with questions about how good that information might be.

Although I don’t mean to pick on Dick Hall and his The UFO Evidence, I find that sometimes the footnotes just don’t add much to our knowledge. On page 121 of that book, Hall wrote:

Venezuela also has a history of sightings by airline pilots and other experienced observers. An orange light closed in on a Venezuelan airliner at 6:45 p.m., January 2, 1955, in the vicinity of Punta San Juan. When the UFO was at close range, the bright light from it shone into the cockpit of the plane intermittently.

According to the footnote, the information came from The APRO Bulletin of April 1955. That entry said:

An orange-tinted light closed in an [sic] a commercial airliner in the vicinity of Punta San Juan, Venezuela at 6:45 p.m. January 2, 1955. The pilot, co-pilot and two other crew members watched the thing until, at close range, it focused some kind of bright light into the cockpit of the plane, at intervals of a few seconds.

And that is all the information that is available. There are no crew member names associated with this, no airline name, it assumes there is a “thing” close by and there is nothing to help us find out what might have happened. There is no way to verify the information, which makes the footnote provided by Dick Hall worthless. It doesn’t provide additional information other than a source that contains the same information and nothing more.

In today’s world, if I was writing the book which was supposed to provide solid evidence for UFOs, I would leave this case out. The only reason it is interesting is the alleged flight crew involvement. If it wasn’t for that, this would case would be ignored. In fact, had it been reported to Project Blue Book (which it wasn’t according to the Blue Book Master Index), it would have been stamped “Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis,” and rightly so.

There is another issue with footnotes as well. Richard Dolan, in his UFOs and the National Security State, reported on what Bill Brazel had said about finding some small pieces of debris on the infamous ranch in the Roswell region (page 21). The footnote credits Don Berliner and Stan Friedman for the data (page 84 – 85) of their book, Crash at Corona. They provide some long quotes attributed to Bill Brazel, but there is nothing to tell when or where the interview was conducted. The implication is that they had conducted the interview themselves at some point probably in Brazel’s home, but that isn’t the case.

The interview in question was conducted on February 19, 1989 in Carrizozo, New Mexico by Don Schmitt and me. I created the transcript of the taped interview, and that was shared with Berliner and Friedman. Dolan’s footnote takes you to one source but not the other, original source. You might disagree with the information provided by Brazel, but the tape of that interview does exist so it can be proven that the information as outlined in UFO Crash at Roswell by Schmitt and me contains an accurate transcription of the interview. This gets you to the original source for the quotes which are the point of this exercise.

The problem with the Berliner and Friedman version is that they have altered the interview so that it tends to corroborate the tales told by Gerald Anderson. They added, in brackets, the word “black” in front of the word “sergeant” who had come to interview Brazel much later. There is nothing in the transcript or in the later interviews with Brazel to suggest that any of the soldiers who visited him were of African-American ancestry. In fact, he flat out denied it and that he never said it.

In fact that point came up several years later when another researcher asked me about the discrepancy. Although it had been suggested that Brazel used another derogatory word for the sergeant, that wasn’t true. The racial makeup of that team never came up because they were all Caucasian.

These two footnotes illustrate the importance of proper collection of data and providing that data to the reader… oh hell, I know, I could point a finger at myself for that. I have used footnotes that referenced other work that failed to take it to its ultimate conclusion. Sometimes that just isn’t possible, but in other cases, especially in the world of the Internet, it is extremely simple.

Roswell Transparency

We have always thought of the new investigation as transparent… oh, I have refused to answer Lance’s questions about the Nuns and how we obtained that information, but that is only because Lance seemed to believe I somehow owed him an explanation. Had he not been so nasty about it, I would have given him what he wanted long ago, but I’m not going to be manipulated in such a transparent way. He’ll just have to wait to learn what I know about this and how the information was originally obtained… and from whom we got it.

 

That said, I was reviewing the video interview of Marian Strickland on Friday as I looked for some information about the “strange thunderclap” during that July 1947 storm. I knew that she had said something about it and wanted to quote her exactly. In that interview, which was conducted by Don Schmitt, Don Berliner and me at Strickland’s home in Roswell, she said (about something else), “Mack thought it was a weather balloon or some sort of experiment. He was glad to do the government a favor to bring them the pieces.”

(I will note here that this interview, along with several others has been posted to YouTube by someone else. This interview had been arranged by me, recorded on my equipment, with questions by Schmitt and Berliner as well as me. Since this material is copyrighted, I’m tempted to have it taken down because whoever posted it had no right to do so… On the other hand, I think everyone should have access to the interviews so that they can see that we have quoted from them accurately and we don’t get into these meaningless little fights about the source and hints of some kind of conspiracy to hide information.)

This one sentence seems to suggest that Brazel knew it was a balloon and if you had a period after he said, “…balloon,” then you’d have a very good case for it. But she adds “or some sort of experiment.” That suggests he didn’t really know what he had found, and other information, from those who actually handled the debris could be cited to eliminate the balloon answer.

I could also mention a story appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9 where he first seemed to describe balloon-borne debris but then takes it back when he said that he had found other weather observation devices and this didn’t resemble them.

In other words, a single sentence in a single interview, said by a woman talking about this in 1991, some 44 years later, doesn’t really give us much. She, as one of those who had been tangentially involved in 1947, meaning she didn’t really see anything, and according to her description, she wasn’t part of the discussion around her kitchen table in the days that followed Brazel’s return to the ranch.

She said, “They were around my table… Mack and I don’t know whether Bill Brazel was there. I don’t remember that. Mack and my kids and Lyman. I was busy carrying the coffee pot. I really heard my sketches [snatches?] of the conversation.”

So, she wasn’t privy to the entire conversation, and I suspect the weather balloon was something that came about later, after the newspaper articles, after The Roswell Incident, after Unsolved Mysteries, and after a host of other discussions about Brazel and what he might have found. Or, in other words, as our skeptical friends so often remind us, these sorts of memories are the result of other influences.

Karl Pflock (whose book it seems some of the skeptics don’t believe I have read… I actually have an autographed copy) only mentioned Strickland twice and in neither case, he didn’t mention that one line. He had access to the tape because Don Berliner had been with me and I had given a copy of the tape to the Fund for UFO Research and Pflock was a member of the FUND. He even mentioned the tape in a footnote, suggesting that the interview was available on the FUND’s Recollections of Roswell. Pflock ignored this little nugget that would have furthered his case.

This is, of course, the sort of thing that we’ve been looking for because it might help us understand what was going on in 1947. But it also has to be put into context because something taken out of context can be twisted around so that it means nearly something else… and if you don’t believe that, you don’t live in a state that is under constant bombardment with political ads.

Glenn Dennis Revisited

A bit of a preface about all this. Several years ago I decided that I would like to be invited to speak at more UFO conventions. I knew the problem was that I held some views that were not universally accepted in the UFO community. I thought that if I had only a skeptical argument I would not say anything about a case. I would promote only those that I believed had some legitimacy.

But I just couldn’t embrace some of the more ridiculous notions in the world of UFOs. The real breaking point came when I listened to Robert Willingham on Jeff Rense’s radio program. Based on what I learned, I knew that Willingham had not been an Air Force colonel. He was not a decorated veteran of World War II or Korea and had not been a fighter pilot. His claims of this military service outraged me. I could not, in good conscience, remain silent when I knew that there was absolutely no evidence that Willingham had served in the Air Force and that his story of a UFO crash was not true.

I had, in the past, suggested that I did not accept the tale told by Glenn Dennis. There were just too many problems in it, the most obvious was the lack of supporting testimony from those who were there, in Roswell, in 1947.

As I said in the last post, the question arose about how I learned Glenn Dennis’ name and that I answered. Walter Haut told me. From there we, and by we I mean Don Schmitt and I began our investigation into the Dennis story. Later others would contribute to our knowledge including Victor Golubic who at the time lived in Arizona and Ted Oliphant who, at the time, was a police officer in Alabama.

When I first met Dennis, in November, 1990, he told the story that he pretty much sticks to today. There have been modifications to it but those have come about because the information we, and when I say we I mean a number of different researchers, had provided.

According to Dennis, he was working at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell when he received a number of telephone calls from the base mortuary officer. He was asking questions about caskets, if they could be hermetically sealed and if he had any small ones in stock. He answered the questions but said that he didn’t have enough of the small caskets.

Later, because the mortuary also ran the ambulance service, not that uncommon in small towns in the 1940s, Dennis ran a slightly injured soldier out to the base. While at the base hospital, he saw a number of military ambulances parked there with their back doors opened. Inside he saw metallic wreckage, again not uncommon if there had been some kind of aircraft accident.

He said inside that ambulance he saw a canoe-shaped object. Not the whole canoe, but just the bow of it. He said that there were some symbols on it but he never really described these for me.
Inside the hospital he saw they were unusually busy, which might have been accounted for by an aircraft accident. He thought he would look up a nurse he knew to learn what happened and maybe buy a Coke before he returned to the mortuary.

The nurse saw him first, in one of the hallways and told him to get out of there before he got himself into some kind of trouble. Before he could react, an officer that he described as having red hair and a nasty attitude caught him and asked him what he was doing in the hospital. The officer was accompanied by a black NCO, whose attitude was equally bad.

According to what Dennis said to me, and said to others, he was told there had been no aircraft accident, there had been nothing going on, and that he should get back to the city as quickly as he could. He would tell no one what he had seen, or thought he had seen, and if he ever mentioned anything about it, they would be picking his bones out of the sand.

He also mentioned that some of the threats came from the black NCO. This has always bothered me given the timing of these events. Yes, there were black NCOs in the Army and there were twenty-five or twenty-six assigned to the base at the time. However, it seems that neither the red-haired officer nor the black NCO were assigned there. They had come into Roswell from some other location.

But this was 1947 and I wondered about a black NCO threatening a white civilian. True, the officer had made the initial threats but given the era, given the racial divide in 1947, would a black NCO felt secure enough to threaten a civilian?

At any rate, Dennis left the base puzzled by all the activity and the security that was being maintained. It confused him, but a day or so later, he said that he had spoken to the nurse he knew. He had met her at the officers club and she had more to say. According to him, she told him that she had been involved in a preliminary autopsy of little creatures. She was sure that they were not from Earth and she told him not to tell anyone what about the events.

I will point out here because it does impact on the validity of his tale, that in the initial interviews, Dennis suggested that there was a romantic interest. He and the nurse had a relation that might have developed into something more permanent. This would explain why she felt she could tell Dennis about an activity that was classified even though she would have been ordered not to talk to anyone who was not cleared to know it.

Within days she was transferred from the base, apparently sent to England. Dennis said that he received one note from her, giving him her address in England. The letter he wrote came back marked, "deceased". She had been killed in an aircraft accident, according to what he was told by other nurses at the base.

This also suggests a relation that was more than casual. That she would write to him while enroute to England suggests a rather strong relation. If such a relation didn’t exist, then there would be no reason for her to communicate with Dennis so quickly.

All this kind of information gave us a witness to the bodies and testimony that those bodies were not human. It gave us information about transfers from the base, and it was a story that ended in tragedy. It would make great television, and we were in Roswell to make a documentary about the crash when I first talked to Dennis.

But this story also provided me with a lot of information I could check. There were components of it that would have been reported in other arenas and all I had to do was find the right information sources.

Yes, Dennis was reluctant to give us the name of the nurse. He said that he had promised her that he would never reveal what she said or who she was. But then she had been dead for decades and was beyond Army regulations and Army punishment for revealing classified information. There was no reason to keep this secret.

He did supply me with a name, with the promise that I would not tell anyone who it was. Naomi Self was the name of the nurse, and I have no trouble revealing it now because Dennis apparently shared that name with many others who released it. Even Philip Klass, in one of his SUN newsletters, gave the name as Naomi Maria Selff, a variation that Dennis had apparently given to Karl Pflock at some point.

Of course I checked the Yearbook that Walter Haut had produced in 1947 that gave us so many names. She wasn’t in it. But then many who had been at the base in 1947 were not listed.

She was not in the base telephone directory which held the names and base telephone numbers for many of the officers. Of course, as a nurse, her name might not appear in that book either.

I had noticed that the Roswell Daily Record, on the front page, nearly everyday, welcomed newly assigned soldiers and officers to Roswell. Her name didn’t surface there either... though I wondered if they would have printed the name of a young, single woman, again given the time frame.

I checked the New York Times Index, which, in the pre-computer age, was a great tool. I could look up aircraft accidents and found them broken down by date, type of aircraft, location, and when and where it had appeared in the newspaper. I searched everything from July 1947 through 1955 and found no aircraft accidents in England, Europe or the United States that had claimed the lives of five Army nurses as Dennis had said.

Don Berliner, who was conducting his own research along similar lines, searched the Stars and Stripes. This is a newspaper printed for the military overseas. Had such a tragedy occurred, then that information would have been published in it. He found nothing.

Not that this proved anything. The Army, in an attempt to stop people from searching for her, put out the rumor that she had been killed. It explained why she had never written to him again. The details he had could be wrong and that was why we could find nothing about it.

There was one source of information that we hadn’t tried and that was the Morning Reports. In the Army, at that time, each unit produced a report of the number of people available for duty that day. Those reporting into a unit were listed by name and serial number. Those sick in the hospital were listed by name and serial number. Those on leave, those on temporary duty and those transferred were listed by name and serial number. And all those morning reports were housed in the big National Archives center in St. Louis. All you had to do was write to them and ask for what you wanted.

Which, of course, I did. And in return I got the Morning Reports, not for the medical staff, but instead for the Headquarters Company. I went back to them a couple of times and was told that the Morning Reports for that particular unit were no where to be found.

You might think that the missing Morning Reports suggest a conspiracy to hide the information and keep us from verifying that the nurse had been stationed in Roswell. A researcher, Vic Golubic, wanted to pursue this. He called the Records Center and talked to several people there. Eventually they located the Morning Reports for the unit.

The critical dates, July and August, were available. Since Self or Selff had apparently been transferred not long after the UFO crash, her name should have been in the Morning Reports in July or August, but it was not. But Golubic had requested the Morning Reports for the whole year of 1947 and much of 1946, so that he had the names of many of the nurses, but no Naomi Maria Selff or Naomi Self or anything that sort of matched.

Golubic would work the problem many different ways according to what he told me, chasing doctors who might have known nurses, civilian agencies in Roswell that would have employed nurses, and even going to the Army which had records of nurses and nursing students that went back into the early 1940s including those from the Cadet Nurse Corps Identification Cards that listed some 124,064 names. He was unable to find any variation of Self’s name in any of these locations.

I worked with a police officer, Ted Oliphant, and we searched throughout the United States attempting to find her. Eventually we would find four women named Naomi Self (yes, it is some what rare name, and we found four), but none was the right one.

I also used one of the CD-ROM telephone directories containing millions of names but couldn’t find her. I tried variations, including those provided by Dennis and still had no luck. And yes, I realize that she might have gotten married and that her married name would probably be different than her maiden name. Still, we could find no trace of her.

Golubic confronted Dennis about this, saying that he could find no record that a nurse with that name even existed. According to what he told me, Dennis said that he had not given any of us the correct name because he had promised to protect her identity. He hinted to Golubic that her last name did begin with an "S" and there was some speculation that it might have been Sipes.

Golubic, like many of us, thought this was just a dodge because we had proved a negative. No record of her in any of the places that it should have been had been found, and when that information was presented, Dennis changed it. That meant we would have to begin all over again.

But I didn’t believe that Dennis had not given us the real name in the beginning. I don’t know why he picked the name he did, but I don’t think he was doing it to protect the nurse. I think he believed we wouldn’t have the resources to track this, and I don’t think he realized the level of documentation existed in the 1940s that did.

I had talked to him once and he said that he couldn’t understand why we couldn’t find his nurse because he had given us the name. He stressed that he had reluctantly shared the real name with us in the hopes of our finding her, or what had really happened to her. Why couldn’t we learn anything?

I pointed out that people have the same name and I had talked, that morning, with a Robert Slusher who had been in the Army during World War II. I was looking for a Robert Slusher who had been with the 509th in Roswell in 1947. The guy I talked to was not the right man.

Dennis then said to me, "Oh, I know Bob Slusher. He lives over in Alamogordo."

When I talked to that Slusher, I learned it was the right man. But the point here is that Dennis was pushing the name, telling us that he had given us the right name and we couldn’t find his nurse. When we said there was no nurse by that name, Dennis changed his story and his nurse’s name.

Given all that, I wasn’t a fan of Dennis. I also learned that he hadn’t been a mortician in 1947 but an embalmer. A slight embellishment and maybe not one of overriding importance. Skeptics would, of course, use this to hammer him if they had known it.

There were other minor alterations in his story but these seemed to be more of the problems with memory than an attempt to deceive. For example, he took us to what had once been the base hospital and laid out the scene for us. He pointed to where the ambulances had been parked, what door he had entered, and what loading area had been used by the military for the bodies (as seen in this picture). The problem here was that the hospital as it stood then, in 1990s was not the hospital in 1947. In 1947, the hospital was comprised of a number of separate buildings, each with it’s own function (as seen below). When I was there in 1990s, a single building had replaced all those others.

It would seem to me that Dennis, if he was telling us the truth, would have known that. It would seem that he would have said that this doesn’t look quite right but there had been no hesitation by him when he was describing the scene to me. This suggests an invented tale rather than a lapse of memory.

Is this another big blunder, or is it just a faulty memory that was fifty years in the making? Given the name trouble, maybe it was just more of the invented tale.

In fact, at one point he was telling people that we all had pressed him for a name, meaning that we UFO investigators had wanted the name. He said that he told us he’d give us a name but that it wouldn’t be the right name. We just hadn’t listened to him when he cautioned us. This was, of course, an attempt to blame UFO researchers for the Naomi Self name. That should have annoyed all of us, but apparently I was about the only one who thought this to be outrageous.

I can take this a step further, which I believe to be important. Dennis had told Karl Pflock that his, Dennis’ nurse, had told him that the autopsies had been performed by two doctors who came in from Walter Reed. That caused researchers to ask why they would have called Dennis about embalming the bodies as he had claimed. Dennis again said that he had been misquoted. The trouble was that he was on video tape saying that his nurse told him that the pathologists would have to do something when they got back to Walter Reed. He hadn’t been misquoted.

There is one other point that should be made and that is that in 1947, according to the City Directory, Dennis was married. His wife’s name was Dorothy. So, why would the nurse have been involved in a romantic situation with Dennis, especially when he described her as a good Catholic girl?

The big problem was the shifting nature of the nurse story and her name. And then his attempts to blame us, meaning the researchers for those changes. But that isn’t the way it was at all. Had he told me that he would give me a name, but it wouldn’t be right, I would have told him to save it. No, what he told me was that he had promised her he wouldn’t tell anything and that I had to promise not to reveal her name. I held onto that promise until it seemed that everyone, Roswell researcher, UFO researcher, UFO skeptic and debunker, and tourist had been given the name.

There was another the thing that bothered me the most about Dennis’s story. He had been unable to provide documentation that he had once promised. And, that the story might not really be his, but was that of another employee at Ballard’s who had received the telephone calls and the inquiries. But that man had died before Dennis entered the arena, which meant the core of the story was true, but Dennis had not been the man in the middle of it.

What I had been told, by some, was that the mortician who received the telephone calls was not Dennis, but another man. That man would later tell Dennis about this and Dennis adopted it as his own story.

While my disappointment hinged on the failed attempts to find his nurse and the changing of her name, there were others who were still looking for Naomi Marie Selff, as the name had evolved. A group calling itself News of the Force (NOTF) said they had contacted three officers at the Pentagon who searched the records available there for Selff but found nothing. One officer said that he found nothing about her in the archives of the Women’s Memorial at Arlington.

But as I say repeatedly, nothing is ever simple in UFO research. NOFT claimed to have found a web site of military records and in their search turned up two women named Naomi Marie Self. One of the entries suggested one of the women was about 87 and the other suggested was 101. However, not long after NOTF found the records they disappeared from the Internet... which means that I can’t verify the information.

NOTF had also initiated some Freedom of Information requests to the Air Force Personnel Center at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. According to them, the reply said, "The Air Force Worldwide Locator searched all available Air Force and Civil Service file computerized indexes (sic) and based on the information you provided did not find any record of ‘Naomi M. Self’ ever having served with the U.S. Air force under that name. AFPC searched all records contained in the Defense Eligibility Enrollment Reporting System (known as DEERS to all of us who have served and retired) database and the National Archives Records Administration (NARA) database, the Automated Records Management System (ARMS) database and the Military Personnel data Systems (MILPDS)... There were no identifiable responses for that name."

I’m afraid they wasted their effort, other than proving, once again that Naomi Self was not the right name and I wonder if these databases were user friendly. Would they have kicked out a name if it had a single F on the end? And, what if Naomi Sipes was the right name? It probably wouldn’t have kicked that out.

Sure, I’ve read some of the supporting statements for Dennis. Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, in their book, Witness to Roswell, reported on a number of people who claimed to have heard the little bodies, little coffin story from Dennis.

Former Roswell police chief L. M. Hall in his 1993 affidavit for the Fund for UFO Search said that he remembered Dennis telling him only a few days after the newspaper stories that he had received telephone calls asking about the small coffins. Hall claimed that Dennis said they wanted "to bury [or ship] those aliens." Hall said that he thought it was some kind of a joke. But this isn’t documentation. It is hearsay.

Besides, there really is nothing in Hall’s statement to anchor this recollection in time. Yes, he says that it was just days after the events in the newspaper, but this might be where he is confused. I can’t think of a reason this should stick in his memory, nor can I think of a reason that it has to be 1947. Hall, here, I believe is, confused.

Carey and Schmitt found Roswell attorney Richard L. Bean who said that he heard the tale of the telephone calls within days of the crash, but it was a couple of years before he heard Dennis talking about it which doesn’t do us much real good either. The couple of years could be something more and again, this doesn’t anchor the event for us.

Most important, none of this information was reported before the explosion of the Roswell case. There is nothing to support the idea that Dennis had been telling this story since 1947 to selected friends.

There doesn’t seem to be any written documentation that transcends the publication of The Roswell Incident. Dennis’ story emerges in 1989 and has since undergone a number of evolutions. I have tracked the story from the beginning and haven’t seen any reason to alter my earlier opinion that there are some real problems with it, not the least of which is the changing name of the nurse.

Once again, I’m at odds with those in the UFO field. Most accept Dennis’ story as legitimate, but I can’t. There are too many red flags, too many discrepancies, and too many changes to it. I have learned, over the years, that a story that changes to incorporate new information is probably not accurate.

So, rather than not say anything about this and letting others fight it out here, I figured I would tell what I knew about Dennis and his missing nurse. Without some kind of verification that does not rely simply on the memories of people who believe that Dennis said something in 1947 to them, I find no reason to accept this tale as accurate.