The Great Not Roswell Slides Coding Fiasco

Given our discussion about the date code on the Not Roswell Slides (which I sort of initiated), I did a little extra digging, though I’m not sure it was worth the effort, and discovered a few things. Tony Bragalia was the first to mention to me that the code on one of the slides proved that the film had been manufactured in 1947 (that is, a square and a triangle). Kodak had a list of codes for their film (see http://www.film-tech.com/ubb/f1/t011524.html). These were recycled every twenty years and we could discuss this at length but it is now irrelevant.

Adam Dew had asked Bragalia, or rather Tom Carey asked Bragalia, to find an expert in Kodak film and processing. Bragalia found the right man, who was both an expert in the film but also something of a historian for Kodak. Carey would later say that “we” (those investigating the slides) had made a trip to Kodak though, in fact, it was only Dew. I guess that was sort of the royal we.

The Kodak man said the slide mount was from the right era and it was clear that the film had been made in the late 1940s. One of the slides, according to Dew, had been removed from the mount. Apparently a chemical analysis of the film showed that it had been developed at the end of the 1940s. Or, in other words, the scientific evidence clearly established that the slide was from the late 1940s and at this point I don’t think anyone is disputing that.

I have since learned that neither Carey nor Don Schmitt had been in Rochester when the analysis was accomplished. They knew the results because Adam Dew had told them. I don’t know what he said, but I can make a good guess about it.

Bragalia said that the codes on the film proved it had been manufactured in 1947, which sparked some discussion here about it last year. I wondered where Bragalia got that idea and thought it came from Dew. I have learned in the last week that Carey was the one who said the codes from 1947 were on the edge of the slide that had been removed from the mount.

When Bragalia announced that these codes were from 1947, I did a little checking. Everyone with access to the Internet could have done the same thing. I learned, as did a couple of others, that the film codes some believed proved the slide film had been manufactured in 1947 was only for motion picture film. The codes for other Kodak film products were different (see http://www.brianpritchard.com/Date%20Codes.htm). If there were codes printed on the edge of the film, they wouldn’t be the same as those being discussed.

Here’s what I think happened which doesn’t suggest anyone was attempting to deceive anyone. Since neither Carey nor Schmitt were in Rochester, I believe that Dew, once he had the results, told them that those results were saying that the analysis proved the film from the late 1940s and might even said from 1947. These results, by the way, don’t seem to be in dispute and since we have now found the location that photograph was taken, it is clear that it was prior to May 1947, but that came about after the great reveal in Mexico City.

Carey, hearing what Dew said, assumed that he was talking about the codes on the edge of the film and remembered the codes that were discussed during the great Alien Autopsy boondoggle. He thought since the film had been manufactured in the right time frame that the code would be the square and triangle. He mentioned this to others including Bragalia. Bragalia then made the erroneous statement that the code proved manufacture in 1947 though to be fair Carey might have actually told him that.

There really isn’t a villain in this aspect of the slide fiasco. The scientific evidence proved the slide film had been manufactured in the right era, the mount was from the right era, and apparently the developing process used a combination of chemicals from the right era. The code, the square and the triangle is not on the edge of the film and that apparently was an assumption made by Carey and passed to others. This, I believe, should put this to rest aspect of the discussion, if anyone really cares.

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.

The Roswell Report - Case Closed... Maybe Not

Here’s something that I don’t believe anyone has commented on. The Roswell Report – Case Closed document issued through the Air Force and written by Captain James McAndrew is based on lies, and if that is the case, then the document is flawed and unreliable.

You might well ask, “What do you mean?”

First, in explaining that anthropomorphic dummies were responsible for the reports of bodies involved with the Roswell crash, McAndrew relies on statements

Jim Ragsdale. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle

made by our old pal, Jim Ragsdale. In fact, this becomes quite important in proving that the Air Force experiments with high altitude ejection systems and other tests were responsible for the tales of bodies being recovered. McAndrew wrote:

Testimony attributed to Ragsdale, who is deceased, states that he and a friend were camping one evening and saw something fall from the sky. The next morning, when they went to investigate, they saw a crash site:

“One part [of the craft] [brackets in McAndrew version] was kind of buried in the ground and one part of it was sticking our [out] of the ground.” “I’m sure that [there] was bodies… either bodies or dummies.” “The federal government could have been doing something they didn’t want anyone to know what this was. They was using dummies in those damned things… they could use remote control… but it was either dummies or bodies or something laying there. They looked like bodies. They were not very long… [not] over four or five feet long at the most. “We didn’t see their faces or nothing like that… we just gotten to the site and the Army… and all [was] coming and we got into a damned jeep and took off.”

This testimony [meaning Ragsdale’s statements] then describes an assortment of military vehicles used to recover the “bodies.”: “It was two or three six-by-six Army trucks a wrecker and everything. Leading the pack was a ’47 Ford car with guys in it… It was six or eight big trucks besides the pickup, weapons carriers and stuff like that.” Ragsdale also said that before he left the area he observed the military personnel “gathering stuff up” and “they cleaned everything up.”

…In his testimony, Ragsdale made numerous references to equipment vehicles, and procedures consistent with documented dummy recoveries for projects HIGH DIVE and EXCELSIOR. The repeated use of the term “dummy” and the witness’ own admission that “they was using dummies in those damned things” and “I’m sure that was bodies… either bodies or dummies” leaves little doubt that what he described was an anthropomorphic dummy recovery.

And that would be a powerful argument except for one fact. Ragsdale was lying. He hadn’t been out there, he hadn’t seen anything fall from the sky and he hadn’t seen dummies to be confused with alien bodies.

McAndrew goes on to explain, “If the witness was even a short distance from odd looking anthropomorphic dummies, it would be logical for him to believe, when interviewed 35 to 40 years after the event, that he ‘thought they were dummies or bodies or something.’

”

And I could go on; pointing out more mistakes in McAndrew’s attempt to convince us all that Ragsdale had seen one of these dummy recoveries, but why? Ragsdale was lying and McAndrew, when he wrote his report, could have found that out. In my book, also published in 1997, The Randle Report, I expose the Ragsdale tale for

Max Littell, closest to the camera, then Walter
Haut and Don Schmitt. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

the lie that it is. I also detail how Max Littell had manipulated the story so that he would have something to talk about when reporters, researchers, and documentarians came to the museum in Roswell. Since my book and McAndrew’s were published in the same year, it would mean that we had access to the same information. McAndrew just didn’t bother to check to see if anything new had been learned about Ragsdale before creating his tale of anthropomorphic dummies.

To make it worse, William P. Barnett, writing in Crosswinds in August 1996, provides, in great detail, the various problems with the Ragsdale story. It is quite clear at that point that there is nothing of value here and that Ragsdale, with coaching from Littell, has changed the story. McAndrew, with the resources of the USAF behind him, should have been able to learn all about the Ragsdale tale. Since it is clearly untrue, it renders all the discussion about Project High Dive and Excelsior, anthropomorphic dummies, and government experimentation moot. The foundation of McAndrew’s theory, which is the Ragsdale nonsense, is erected on quicksand.

There are other problems as well. On page 46 of his report, McAndrew compares a drawing of a triangular-shaped object provided by Frank Kaufmann with “A tethered ‘Vee’ balloon shown… at Holloman AFB, N.M. in March 1965. This experimental balloon, is strikingly similar to the ‘alien’ craft.’”

Unfortunately for McAndrew, and something that he might have suspected when he wrote his book, Kaufmann was not telling the truth. It wasn’t until after 2000 that Kaufmann was exposed, thanks to the work of Mark Rodeghier, Mark Chesney and Don Schmitt. Given that, we can now say that his analysis of comparing the object drawn by Kaufmann to that launched at Holloman is in error as well.

Glenn Dennis

He also attacks the “missing nurse” story told by Glenn Dennis. The problem here, as it is with these other tales he uses is that the Dennis story is bogus as well. There is no missing nurse, information which was available in 1997 but McAndrew failed to find. Wouldn’t a stronger case be made by pointing this out rather than going off on the tangent that he does?

Maybe the most egregious error by McAndrew (and I’m being a bit generous here) is the illustration on page 6 that shows a long Mogul array. Although he suggests that the illustration is similar to the one found by Mack Brazel, it is actually from Mogul Flight No. 2 which had a configuration different than those used in New Mexico. He says nothing about that which is misleading at best.

What is given here is a report used to explain away the tales of bodies by suggesting government experiments in the 1950s. Had McAndrew done his homework, had he investigated all this rather than just read a bunch of books and official documents, he actually could have made a much stronger case. As it is, his argument fails because he used bogus information to support it.

Before anyone feels the need to point out that this sword cuts both ways, let me note that while Phil Klass and Karl Pflock rejected Ragsdale and Kaufmann, they did so only because they did not believe that anything alien fell near Roswell. They were right for the wrong reason, but it was those of us on the other side of the fence that worked to expose these people when we learned the truth. It would have been better had we known the truth before we promoted their tales and it took us a while to get to that point, but we did arrive at it… I have seen nothing from McAndrew acknowledging that his book was based on that same false information.

Walter Haut - Lost in the Roswell Minutae

Over the years Walter Haut made many recorded statements about what he had done and seen in Roswell in July, 1947. For decades, all he had done, according to those statements, including many to me, was write the press release. He had taken that release to the various media outlets in Roswell… or he had called them and read the release to them over the telephone. He signed an affidavit to that effect and told the story to dozens of UFO researchers, reporters and documentary producers.

Walter Haut on the set of "Roswell."
Photo copyright Kevin D. Randle

On April 20, 1989, I talked to Haut briefly. I was asking about the events there in Roswell and he was answering with one word answers which weren’t rude, just brief. Telling me again of the event and how he hadn’t done all that much, he finally said, “I hate to be that way but…” meaning just falling back on his standard answers including that his only role was to write the press release.

In May, 1993, he created and signed an affidavit saying basically the same thing. He had written the press release, and that was it. That was all he knew. That was his only involvement in the case.

But then, in 2000, he began to hint that he had seen more. He told Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthaser that he had been heavily involved. He later signed an affidavit prepared by Don Schmitt suggesting he had seen the remains of the craft and he had seen one of the bodies, or maybe more of them, it all just depended on which statement you heard. He had kept the secret as he had promised back in 1947 and he didn’t want this new affidavit released until after his death, though he certainly hadn’t been overly quiet about these new claims. Here, now, was an affidavit by one of the officers allegedly included in the inside circle of the staff, signing a legal document that suggested he had seen alien beings. It was an extraordinary document if it could be believed.

In the last couple of years, I have been looking through the files, documents, transcripts and newspaper clippings that I have collected over the years concerning the Roswell case. I have, literally, file cabinets filled with the information so that my review has not been as fast as it could have been.

The problem I found concerning Haut is not that his earlier statements contradict his later statements, but that his later statements were highly confused and highly contradictory. Haut is on the record in too many places saying that all he did was write the press release. In fact, in one of those earlier interviews filmed in 1979, Haut said, “Colonel Blanchard told [me] to put out [a] news release concerning [the] flying disc but that [I] couldn’t see it…”

In listening to people describing what they had seen and done, you sometimes hear what are often termed as “weasel words.” This means that they don’t want to lie but they are attempting to avoid the truth. Frank Kaufmann was skilled at this. He was famous for saying, “Well, I think so…” Not that something was true, but that “I think so.”

But this statement by Haut, made on film in 1979, is quite definitive. Haut was saying that Blanchard was not allowing him to see it. No flipping or flopping but a strong, positive statement that he stayed with for more than two decades.

Compare that statement to those made in the interviews conducted after 2000, where he was saying that he had only written the press release and then saying he had seen a craft and the bodies. Or that he had seen one body and then back to the original idea that he had only written the press release. He would often contradict himself within a single paragraph and sometimes in a single sentence. Anyone seeing these confused interviews would be concerned about the clear and concise statements in that later affidavit. It is just too perfect given how those statements have been gathered after 2000.

This one quote, “but that [I] couldn’t see it,” tells us a great deal and I would suggest that it tends to render that later affidavit as inaccurate at best. It would seem that it suggests we should reject the affidavit in light of what he had said for decades. I don’t know the motivation for his changing his mind about it. All I know is that I find the original statements, especially that about not being allowed to see “it” as much more persuasive than this affidavit cobbled together from what seem to be the ramblings of a witness more than half a century after the event. One statement was clear and concise and said many times and the other was something that came more than a half century after the fact and wasn’t all that clear . But then, it really comes down to what you wish to believe and which statements you trust the most. For me it is those given for so many years and not those that came so late in the game.

Darwin Rasmussen and the Roswell Bodies

In keeping with my series on Chasing Footnotes, I have found a subtopic that is almost as interesting (well, it is to me) which is finding original sources (which, of course, is sort of the same thing). Not all that long ago I ran across an analysis of the Roswell case in which it was claimed that Captain Darwin Rasmussen (later Colonel) had assisted Major Jesse Marcel in recovering the alien bodies. I have never heard anything like that and it puzzled me because, as far as I knew, only Stan Friedman and I had interviewed Rasmussen’s cousin, Elaine Vegh.

Now that you all are thoroughly confused, let me explain. Back in 1990, I learned of Elaine Vegh whose claim to fame in this arena was that her first cousin, Darwin Rasmussen, had been a career Air Force officer who was stationed in Roswell in 1947. According to her, she had been standing near her father when Rasmussen reportedly said, “…never doubt that there is a cover up here. We did pick up bodies and the Air Force does have them.”

She also said, “He had seen what was picked up. He had seen the craft.”

First, before the skeptics all go nuts, let me point out that this is a second-hand story of an overheard conversation that had taken place at least a decade and a half prior to that. As evidence of anything, it isn’t worth very much. Elaine Vegh was probably relating the story as best she could remember, but see didn’t see anything herself and her memory of this is somewhat clouded… I’ll get back to this.

That was really all she said to me. Her cousin had been part of a retrieval team; he had seen bodies and the wrecked craft. She had nothing in the way of evidence, there are or were no family letters or documents, and according to Vegh, Rasmussen said, “I was there… but we were told to forget what we saw…”

Well, Rasmussen’s picture is not in the Yearbook, but that doesn’t matter. I have a copy of the Roswell base telephone directory published in August 1947, and his name is in there. That puts him in Roswell at the right time. I also found his name associated with a 509^th flight crew.

Second, this little tale has not been used very often. Friedman seems to have ignored it, and given everything, I’m not overly surprised. It is second hand without any corroboration. Rasmussen died in 1975 and Vegh’s father died in 1983. No one else heard the conversation and there wasn’t much in the way of detail.

Yes, I used it in UFO Crash in Roswell and Tom Carey and Don Schmitt used it in Witness to Roswell, interestingly without providing credit for the interview. Their footnote just mentioned an interview in 1990 (March 1, 1990 to be precise) but failed to mention that I conducted it, taped it, and supplied a copy to Don. Anyone reading their book might conclude they had conducted the interview.

There was a reference to Rasmussen and what he had seen at:

http://www.truthenginebook.com/Ros1b.html

In this case, it was suggested that Rasmussen had seen four bodies and Vegh did say that he, Rasmussen "... had first hand knowledge of four beings and their craft..." Here Rasmussen is described as the Operations Officer for the 715^th Bomb Squadron which was part of the 509^th. The referenced sources here are both UFO Crash at Roswell and Witness to Roswell. In Witness to Roswell he is described as a flight operations officer and in UFO Crash at Roswell as an Operations Officer (and unfortunately the organization is misidentified as the 718^th). I have since located some records that showed he was assigned to an aircrew as a radar officer for Operation Crossroads. That information, which does not relate to Roswell, can be seen here:

http://www.atomicvetkin.com/hotplanes.htm

Another reference found retold the story, clearly from UFO Crash at Roswell, but the text does identify the source, and it comes back to me. It adds nothing to it until that recent note that injected Jesse Marcel into it by someone else.

I can find nothing to explain where the idea came that Rasmussen had mentioned Marcel. Tracing the tale to the source, which is probably me given that Friedman didn’t use it, I know that Vegh did not say that to me. The conclusion that I draw is that someone somewhere just assumed that Marcel would have been involved and injected him into a tale in which his name had not surfaced. In Witness to Roswell Carey and Schmitt argue that Marcel had to have seen the bodies so it is not a large step to Marcel and Rasmussen being together at some point. This, I believe, is an assumption made by them but is not based on any testimony.

And finally let’s talk about that clouded memory. Vegh had said that she had overheard the story when she was 10 or 12. In 1990, and I’m sure she would be annoyed for me saying this, she was 62. She also said that she had graduated from high school in 1945… which means that, if she had the timing right, this had nothing to do with Roswell…

That’s a point she figured out later as we discussed this. I mentioned that the crash was in 1947 (is that such a big secret that I should have kept it to myself… and oh, she had seen the Unsolved Mysteries broadcast before we spoke so I wasn’t giving away anything and we had talked about the date throughout the interview) she said, “I graduated high school in 1945 so I must have been little older.”

So, we see that her original memory was of her overhearing this when she was younger was inaccurate, and I’m not sure that’s the real problem here. Misremembering her age seems fairly trivial in the overall scheme of things. The real problem is the lack of corroboration for the story. True, her cousin was in Roswell at the right time, and since he died in 1975, this would have been before all the Roswell information came out (she didn’t mention it until 1990 remember) but there is just nothing here we can prove. It is a story with almost no real foundation, told by a sincere woman who clearly believes it, but it is also told by a woman who did not accurately remember her age at the time. This tale is one of those little bits of trivia that seem to dot the Roswell landscape.

Roswell Update: Jay West and Lieutenant Colonel Duran

I have often wondered why it was that Karl Pflock went after me in his anti-Roswell book. I have often wondered why there are those who quote from it as if it had been written in stone but ignored the mistakes he made in it. I have wondered why the fourth note on the map included on the inside covers of the book said, “The ‘revisionist’ Randle – Schmitt/first Ragsdale/ ‘true’ Kaufmann crash site,” when it was, in fact, the first site that Ragsdale identified. Wouldn’t the new site, out by Boy Scout Mountain and championed by the late Max Littell, be the “revisionist” site since it came after our interview with Ragsdale and his identification of the site we mentioned?

But none of this is overly relevant to the purpose here, and that is to clarify another short group of quotes that is not exactly accurate. These concerned two witnesses Don Schmitt and I had named in our earlier books, which Pflock seemed to believe were misrepresented at best and confabulated at worst. Jay West and Lieutenant Colonel Albert Lovejoy Duran were the men named and Pflock said he couldn’t find them. He wrote:

Also included is Jay West, purportedly in 1961 a United Press International Stringer working in Alamogordo. According to Randle and Schmitt, West “became friendly with the base [presumably, Holloman Air Force Base, formerly Alamogordo Army Air Base] [brackets in original] public information officer. The PIO had found a file that mentioned the Roswell crash that included a map. The PIO got a topographical map of the crash site. According to West, they made trips out to try to locate the crash. West described the map as showing the debris field and then, two and a half miles to the east, a second site.

Curiously, other than the above, which appears in the timeline section of the UFO Crash at Roswell, and the entry in the list of interviewees (“conducted in person, Nov 1989”) [parens in original], West and his story appear nowhere else in the book, including the index [which for those of you keeping score at home neither Don nor I constructed], and he is given similarly short shift in Randle and Schmitt’s second book, The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. Yet, clearly West could be the key to the Roswell mystery, the lever needed to pry the lid off the crashed-saucer cover-up.

Early on, Fred Whiting of the Fund for UFO Research and I sought to learn more about West from Randle and Schmitt. The answers we got were vague and rather evasive. Meanwhile with the help of a friend with extensive experience in New Mexico, and national journalism, I attempted to track down Jay West. We came up completely dry, rather like Glenn Dennis’s nurse.

A few years later, on August 3, 1999, I received an email message from Kevin Randle asking, “Did you talk to Frank Lovejoy Duran [previously mentioned alleged witness to alien bodies] [brackets in original]? This was a source that Schmitt developed and seemed to be quite impressed with.”

Replying in the negative, I took the opportunity to once again bring up Jay West. The next day, Randle replied, “Jay West was a guy Schmitt met in Florida (if I remember the story correctly [and in listening to the tape again, they were in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the time]) while he was down there interviewing either DuBose or Rickett. West provided him with the information but no documentation. We did search the files at White Sands and I took a FOIA request to Holloman….” Presumably with negative results, although Randle did not tell me that explicitly.

While all this is the truth, it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Starting with Jay West, I will note that I have a tape of the interview that Don conducted. It sounded like they were at an indoor swimming pool for the interview because of the level of noise in the background and the noise sounded like that when I was on the swimming team in high school. There are points where it seems that you can hear the life guard’s whistle reinforcing the idea of an indoor pool.

West spends a great deal of time talking about his experiences at White Sands watching the missile launches and mentioned, specifically, the anti-missile missiles. After a strange gap in the tape, he finally got around to talking about their attempts to find the crash site. He had a map that was found at Holloman AFB and the base PIO was involved in the search. They traveled around New Mexico attempting to find the location.

West said, “So we went back to Roswell… and I’m not talking about the road maps, I’m talking about the topography maps and what they had were little ‘Xs’ all over the place and what [appeared] to be crossed lines… [What we saw during our searches] they could have been gouges… they could have been tire tracks… We walked around for a couple of hours and tried not to step on any snakes…”

He then launched into an explanation of what the map was. A huge topographical map which sounded to me as if he was talking about the kind of map we used in Army Aviation. Not really an aeronautical chart, but something that contained the surface features such as rivers, ravines, mountains, hills, elevations and that sort of thing. He finally said that it was like a military land navigation map.

He then said, “Over here there was a circular object… [here meaning an area on the ground].”

Don said, “There are a lot of sinkholes in the area.”

West replied that it wasn’t a sinkhole or anything like that. He seemed to be suggesting that it was some sort of circular area on the ground but the quality of the tape is so bad that I’m not sure. He could have been talking about some kind of a burned area, or a place where the sand had fused into glass. None of that is particularly significant because this could have been the result of a lightning strike at some point and there was nothing said that would tie it directly into Roswell except for the file in which the PIO said the map was found.

West said, “Now I don’t have… aside from the fact that was circular and the scale wasn’t all that big…

Don asked, “Where would this area have been in relation to…

West interrupted to say that he didn’t know. That he’d have to see a map but that the map they had been using was a photocopy of a larger map. He said that north was not to the top.

He began to describe the area. It looked as if someone had used a bulldozer and that “it looked like the whole area had been vacuumed.”

But the problem was, of course, even though he said the map had come from a file that had been labeled “Roswell,” and he had been out there seeing terrain that varied from that which had not been manipulated, when all was said and done, he had been out there in 1961, at least according to what he said, and he was now talking about this in 1989 or nearly thirty years later. While this had the potential to provide some corroboration for the Roswell crash, and he had said he still had the map, which would, of course provide some documentation, he never produced the map. This was a lead that went nowhere.

We tried to follow up and I spoke to people at the White Sands Missile Range, but they said they knew nothing about this. I hand carried a FOIA request to Holloman AFB and to the PIO office, but again, this was now more than thirty years after the fact, and the request produced no results. I had thought, and still think, that it should be possible to learn who was assigned to the PIO office in 1961 (though my recent attempts to follow up have gone nowhere and there had been no answers to my questions) … though such records might have been moved more than once and determined to be of no importance today. We never did not learn who the PIO was that had talked to West.

So, when Pflock noted that the information about West only appeared in the timeline of our first book, part of the reason was that we had found nothing to corroborate the story. That didn’t mean it was untrue, it simply meant that we were somewhat dubious about it. Had the tape been easier to understand, had we been able to learn the name of the PIO, had we found anything to establish that this was a more important part of the Roswell case, we would have given it a more prominent place in the book. As it was, here was a story that had been told to us, one of which we had no reason to reject, but then, little reason to feature because it provided nothing more than a map we hadn’t seen, file that no longer existed and a description of a site that we couldn’t find.

There were reasons for the somewhat vague answers to Pflock’s questions. I had given him everything that I knew and while we couldn’t prove the information useful, I did have a tape which proved we hadn’t invented it, though that seems to be something implied, vaguely, in Pflock’s book.

There was something else operating here and it was that I had read Roswell in Perspective, that is, Pflock’s report on Roswell to the Fund for UFO Research, some years earlier and realized that I was often the target. To complicate matters, when he had completed that project, I had sent him a carefully worded note congratulating on the completion of a long task but he immediately began telling people that I had agreed with his conclusions. There was nothing in the note to support that claim and I issued a statement explaining that my intent was to note a colleague’s completion of a task but had said nothing about endorsing his conclusions.

Here’s something else that seemed to have been ignored. Pflock never identified this “a friend with extensive experience in New Mexico, and national journalism.” While I suspect that might have been Jason Kellahin who had been one of the reporters sent from Albuquerque to Roswell in 1947, I don’t know this. We don’t have the person’s identity which means we don’t even know if it was a man or a woman, and there is no way to confirm the person’s expertise or to confirm Pflock’s conclusion on this. In other words, this unknown person with unknown credentials adds nothing to our knowledge at all but is used to suggest something nefarious on the parts of Schmitt and me. West might not have been who he claimed to be, but the information provided by Pflock does not allow us to evaluate West’s claim and does nothing to discredit it.

We then move onto Lieutenant Colonel Albert Lovejoy Duran. Pflock didn’t do much with this, other than a vague suggestion attributed to me that Schmitt had found the witness and was impressed with him.

I’m not sure why Pflock would ignore Duran almost completely if he was convinced we had done something that was unfair. We had relegated Duran to a single footnote in the first book and never mentioned him again. This, by itself, would suggest that he was not a source that we had done much with given the facts. Pflock provided no new information about Duran and apparently was unable to find any record of the man, though Pflock did mention the Army Records Center in St. Louis in his attempts, or others attempts, to find the nurses from the base in 1947. Apparently Pflock’s attempt to verify Duran’s military service failed, which is not to say that Duran had not served in the military only that Pflock had failed to confirm it.

The information came to us after a lecture in Alamogordo. A friend told us that her friend, Juanita Valenzuela, whose father had been in the military and who was currently living in Utah, said that he had been assigned to a unit at White Sands Proving Ground (which became the White Sands Missile Range) that had been sent into the desert north of Roswell. She suggested that bodies had been found at that location. Because of this information, which seemed to corroborate part of the Frank Kaufmann story, we had put it in a footnote, naming the name. We had confirmed his military service. I will note here that since Valenzuela didn’t know about Kaufmann, this was independent information which should not be judged by the failure of the Kaufmann testimony.

And, here's why we didn’t do much else with this. We were able to confirm his military service and retirement at the rank provided. Duran was apparently an alcoholic, who eventually moved to Colorado. A friend, Sergeant Arne Oldman, who was assigned to White Sands at the time (meaning early 1990s) attempted to interview Duran, but Duran’s cirrhosis of the liver made that problematic and Duran died before Oldman could meet with him in person though he did talk to him over the telephone conducting a somewhat preliminary interview. After he died, Don did talk to the daughter one more time and she stood by the tale she told. Because all this, and our failure to get Duran on tape, we let go of the story.

However, since someone brought this up on this blog, assuming, I believe because of Pflock’s failure to identify Duran (and his failure to locate West for the matter) that we had fudged the information. No one seemed to think that Pflock might have stopped his search when he had gotten the answers he wanted, spun that information the way he wanted, and made it sound as if we had invented these guys or their stories.

But there was a problem for Pflock and that was he didn’t know anything about Duran, and if he attempted to run the name by the Army in St. Louis, and he didn’t supply something other than the name, he might not have found the guy. On the other hand, I used a government publication, one printed every year, looking for any mention of Duran and found his name in it, confirming that he had retired as a lieutenant colonel. This does not mean the story he shared with his daughter, especially when he had been drinking, was true, only that the man existed and that he had retired as a lieutenant colonel.

This then, should answer all the questions about Jay West and Lieutenant Colonel Albert Duran. They are real people, West was interviewed on tape, and evidence proving Duran was a military officer has been found. They fell out of “favor” when there was no corroboration for what West said and when repeated attempts to interview Duran in person failed. Moving to higher standards of evidence was another of the reasons that they weren’t mentioned. But the claims of Pflock were not proven and while his dismissal of them was understandable, some of the reasons given were as nebulous as the stories told by these two men.

As I have said so often, these two tales, because they are now part of the Roswell case should be relegated to footnotes (which is basically where you can find them). Since they are part of the Roswell story, they must be addressed, but they added nothing significant to the case.

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 Next Not Roswell Slides Chapter

One of the reasons that the posts here appear on an irregular basis is that I wait for some sort of inspiration to hit. I had put up the post on the size of the debris field with the idea to do the same with descriptions of the debris, or which officers said what about the crash and the like. Rich Reynolds also chastised me for not answering his question about UFO movies and I wanted to do something with the Hangar One nonsense about the Kingman UFO crash which I figured would alienate most of MUFON and the entire population of Kingman. Today, however, a question that I had no answer for appears to have an answer.

I had wondered why Tom Carey had so tenaciously held onto the idea that the image in the Not Roswell Slides was an alien creature. I wondered why Don Schmitt seemed to vacillate between understanding the image was an unfortunate child and it was actually something alien. Given the evidence and documentation, it seemed that the image’s identity was obvious to anyone who looked at it dispassionately, at the other photographs available of that mummy and at the documentation that surrounded its discovery, recovery and display in museums in Colorado and Arizona.

Today, I have the answer in the form of a new book by them, and Jaime Maussan, as part of the BeWitness project or whatever they called it. I’m not going to publish the link because this is not a book that should be in any serious library besides it is currently only available in Spanish. It reminds me of the continuing series of books and programs on the Bermuda Triangle after Lawrence Kusche wrote The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved. It did, in its pages, produce an intelligent and viable solution to the questions asked about the Triangle and seems to be ignored in most documentaries about that nonsense.

We are in the same place with the Not Roswell Slides. The identity of the image has been well established yet we are subjected to another “analysis” of that image based only on what is shown in the pictures and not on an examination of the remains. I suspect they will reject the research done by others that is in conflict with what they say, will trot out the same experts to endorse their original opinions, and continue to promote this as some sort of evidence of alien visitation.

Yes, I am making this prediction on nothing more than the fact the book is available as an ebook (in Spanish for nearly 20 bucks) and one that I have no intention of buying… and yes again, it is difficult to “review” a book without actually reading it, but then I do know the story of how all this came about and what the evidence supporting their conclusions are. Unless this is an expose on how they were duped into supporting the idea that the image was of an alien creature this new ebook will not reflect any sort of reality. If it is just an outgrowth of the fiasco in Mexico City, this marks the further decline in what we now laughingly call Ufology. I thought we had hit bottom in the hours after Mexico City but I see that I was wrong.

Bessie Brazel Schreiber and the Roswell Crash

The skeptics believe they have a slam dunk on the Roswell, coming at us with information that simply is not proven as we look at it. Much of it is single witness that we are accused of not mentioning and often contradicts that given by many others. One of the best examples of this is the testimony provided by Bessie Brazel, who seems to have been a very nice woman but who stood nearly alone in her testimony for many years.

In the early 1990s, the Fund for UFO Research, FUFOR, initiated a program to gather testimony and affidavits from Roswell witnesses. Naturally, one of those was Bessie Brazel Schreiber. In her affidavit, she said:

William W. “Mack” Brazel was my father. In 1947, when I was 14, he was the manager of the Foster Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, near Corona. Our family had a home in Tularosa, when my mother, my younger brother Vernon, and I lived during the school year. The three of us spent the summers on the Foster place with dad.

In July 1947, right around the Fourth, dad found a lot of debris scattered over a pasture some distance from the house we lived in on the ranch. None of us was riding with him when he found the material, and I do not remember anyone else being with him. He told us about it when he came in at the end of the day.

Dad was concerned because the debris was near a surface-water stock tank. He thought having it blowing around would scare the sheep and they would not water. So, a day or two later, he, Vernon and I went to the site to pick up the material. We went on horseback and took several feed sacks to collect the debris. I do not recall just how far the site was from the house, but the ride out there took some time.

There as a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seems to me now to have about the size of a football field [or about an acre]. There may have been additional material spread out more widely by the wind, which was blowing quite strongly.

The debris looked like pieces of a large balloon which had burst [When balloons burst do they shatter into dozens or hundreds of tiny bits?]. The pieces were small, the largest were small, the largest I remember measuring about the same as the diameter of a basketball. Most of it was a kind of double-sided material, foil-like on one side and rubber-like on the other. Both sides were grayish silver in color, the foil more silvery than the rubber. Sticks, like kite sticks, were three inches wide and had flower-like designs on it. The “flowers” were faint, a variety of pastel colors, and reminded me of Japanese paintings in which the flowers are not all connected. I do not recall any other types of material or markings, nor do I remember seeing gouges in the ground or any other signs that anything may have hit the ground hard.

The foil-rubber material could not be torn like ordinary aluminum foil can be torn [A small bit of information that the debunkers tend to overlook]. I do not recall anything else about the strength or other properties of what we picked up.

We spent several hours collecting the debris and putting it in sacks. I believe we filled about three sacks, and we took them back to the ranch house. We speculated a bit about what the material could be. I remember dad saying “Oh, it’s just a bunch of garbage.”

Soon after, dad went to Roswell to order winter feed [which is not what the newspaper articles claimed]. It was on this trip that he told the sheriff what he had found. I think we all went into town with him, but I am not certain about this [which is another fact often overlooked], as he made two or three trips to Roswell about that time, and we did not go on all of them. (In those days, it was an all-day trip, leaving very early in the morning and returning after dark. [Please note the travel time given by someone who made the trips.]) I am quite sure that it was no more than a day trip, and I do not remember dad taking any overnight or longer trips away from the ranch around that time.

Within a day or two, several military people came to the ranch. There may have been as many as 15 of them. One or two officers spoke with dad and mom, while the rest of us waited. No one spoke with Vernon and me. Since I seem to recall that the military were on the ranch most of a day, they may have gone out to where we picked up the material. I am not sure about this, one way or the other, but I do remember they took the sacks of debris with them.

Although it is certainly possible, I do not recall anyone finding any more of the material later. Dad’s comment on the whole business was, “They made one hell of a hullabaloo out of nothing.”

Since she gave that affidavit, she has been interviewed by others. The story told to them is substantially the same as that in the affidavit, though, when interviewed by John Kirby and Don Newman on March 8, 1995, she told them, “I wasn’t terribly excited or interested in it [the debris recovery] when it happened and I haven’t really gotten any more interested in it.”

She did say that her father had found the debris sometime before July 4 and that she, her father and her brother Vernon, collected it. She said, “We had three or four sacks... we stuffed the sacks and tied [them] to the saddle... Dad just stuck it [the sacks of debris] under the steps.”

It was the following week that her father took the debris into Roswell. She confirmed to Kirby and Newman that she, her mother and brother had gone with him. While he was in the sheriff’s office, they were in a nearby park. She said, “He was there quite a while because it was late afternoon or early evening when we started back to the ranch.”

According to her, when they returned, they were not followed by any civilian or military vehicles. That means that the testimony of Jesse Marcel was in error if we accept this. It also means that Sheridan Cavitt and his testimony is in error, if we accept this.

The Debris Field as identified by Bill Brazel as it appeared in the early 1990s.

She said, “They didn’t go with us. They came up, I don’t know, if it was the next day or a couple of days later.”

She also said that they had cleaned the field and picked up all the debris. She said that they had it all. There was nothing for Marcel or Cavitt to see when they went to the field. In fact, in talking with ranchers in the area about this debris, whether from a Mogul balloon array or an alien spacecraft, I learned that they would not allow this sort of thing to remain out there. The animals had a habit of eating things like that as part of their grazing and if the animals ate it, it would make them sick. Brazel would clean it up as quickly as possible.

If we believe Bessie, then her father did not clean it up right away, but did within a couple of days. She said that it took several hours and that she and her brother Vernon had helped. Yet, we know that when Marcel arrived, there was a large field filled with debris. And, if we want to reject the testimony of Marcel, there is Cavitt. While his description of the debris field suggests it was smaller than that suggested by Marcel, he still said there was debris out there for them to find and for him to identify as the remains of a balloon.

So, Bessie’s story is contradicted by Marcel and Cavitt, one who later thought it was a spacecraft and one who said it was a balloon after saying he had never been involved in a balloon recovery. It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you come down on, there is testimony to contradict what Bessie remembers about the cleaning of the debris field. She is stand alone on this.

Bessie also said that her father didn’t return to Roswell a day or so after his initial trip and there is nothing in her affidavit to suggest otherwise. She added, telling Kirby and Newman that if he had gone to Roswell and didn’t return for three or four days, there would have been hell to pay. There was no reason for him to return to Roswell after they all had gone there earlier in the week especially if the Army had arrived to take charge of the debris stored under the steps.

But once again, there is evidence that such is not the case. First, and probably best, is the article that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on July 9. Mack Brazel was photographed while there. He gave an interview to two AP reporters at the newspaper office in Roswell. Clearly, he returned to Roswell at some point. Bessie’s memory of the events is wrong about his not returning as documented in the newspapers.

Major Edwin Easley was the provost marshal in Roswell in 1947. He told me that Mack Brazel had been held in the guest house for several days. Brazel said he was in jail and I suppose that if you’re not allowed to leave without escort and that the doors are locked, then being in the guest house is about the same thing. This information was corroborated by a number of Brazel’s neighbors.

Bill Brazel, Bessie’s older brother told me that he saw an article about his father in one of

Brazel on the front page of the newspaper.

the Albuquerque newspapers [Kal Korff incorrectly claims that there were no pictures of Mack or articles about him on the front pages of any of the newspapers at the time] and realized that his father needed help. When Bill arrived at the ranch, his father was not there and didn’t return for three or four days. In fact, according to Bill, there was no one at the ranch at that time.

Neighbors like Marian Strickland told me that Mack had complained to her about being held in jail. Although she didn’t see Mack until after the events, she did say that he sat in her kitchen complaining about being held in Roswell. While there is some second-hand aspect in this, Strickland was telling me that Mack complained to her and her husband that he had been held in Roswell.

Walt Whitmore, Jr., son of the KGFL radio’s majority owner, told me that he had run into Brazel early in the morning after Brazel spent the night at his father’s house. This was before Brazel was taken out to the base. Whitmore claims that Brazel told him about the debris and Whitmore said that he then drove out there to see the field. He claimed to have picked up some of the debris, which he said was part of a balloon. He kept it for years, he said, but when the time came to produce it, he could not. This information was in conflict with what he told to Bill Moore and published in The Roswell Incident. I will note here that I do not find this testimony to be reliable but mention it because it puts Brazel overnight in Roswell.

Here’s another important point. Bessie said that she recognized the material as a balloon. So, we have a 14-year-old girl who knows a balloon when she sees one, but the air intelligence officer, not to mention several others, are incapable of this. If the material was so readily identifiable to some, especially civilians, why were so many in the military fooled? And why the high powered effort to recover it and get samples of it to Fort Worth if it was only a balloon?

But she told Bill Moore when he asked her if it was some sort of a weather balloon, she said:

No, it was definitely not a balloon. We had seen weather balloons quite a lot – both on the ground and in the air. We had even found a couple of the Japanese-style balloons that come down in the area once. [This might be a reference to the Japanese balloon bombs of World War II but there is no evidence that one ever landed in New Mexico, which is strange since they had landed in the states all around New Mexico.] We also picked up a couple of those thin rubber balloons with instrument packages. This was nothing like that. I have never seen anything resembling this sort of thing before – or since… We never found any pieces of it –afterwards – after the military was there…

Karl Pflock suggested that Bill Brazel had corroborated that the family was at the ranch at the time, implying that they participated in the cleanup. He wrote:

In a 1979 interview, Bessie Schreiber’s older brother Bill recalled other members of his family being on the ranch with his father at the time the debris fell there. “Dad,” he said, “was in the ranch house with two of the younger kids [presumably Bessie and Vernon [insertion made by Pflock]] late on evening when a terrible lightning stormy came up… [T]he next morning while riding out over the pasture to check on some sheep, he came across this collection of wreckage.” Bill mentioned specifically that, on the way to Roswell with some of the debris, his father dropped off the children with their mother in Tularosa.

This means, simply, that while Bessie and Vernon might have been on the ranch for the thunderstorm, they did not accompany him into Roswell, weren’t there when the military came back with Mack and wasn’t there for the cleanup that took place later. Bill Brazel certainly does nothing to corroborate that Bessie or Vernon were there for the events in the following days.

There are a number of witnesses and newspaper articles that shows that Mack was in Roswell overnight. It means that Bessie’s memories of July 1947 agree with nothing else. It means that when all the evidence is aligned against a specific claim, we must reject the claim even if some of the evidence is from the decades old memories.

This takes another turn sometime later, and I’m sure the allegation will be hurled that the UFO researchers pressed her into recanting her story at that time. She told Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, “It was another occurrence altogether. I had helped my dad gather up weather balloons on a number of occasions. I have come to the conclusion that what my dad found back at that time was something else altogether.” They added, “It is accepted that she and her brother Vernon were at the ranch at the time of the incident, but the ranch house was almost 10 miles from the debris field …” Her brother, Bill, referring to the debris field said, “She wasn’t even there.”

While we are aware of the testimony, and while I’m sure that she was sincere in what she said, it is clear that she was mistaken. When we compare the written record with her testimony, we can see the errors. If the conflict in the testimony was just between Bessie and her brother, Bill, we would have a “he said/she said” argument, but others who were there corroborate what her brother said. Then, we have her recanting the testimony, which by itself, should eliminate it from the record. But the real point here is that we did investigate her claims, did make sure she was interviewed, and have provided information about it. She wasn’t ignored, just found to be in conflict with too much other information that was corroborated.

Photographs copyright by Kevin Randle.