Roswell Documentation vs. Roswell Eyewitnesses

Since I have now annoyed all my friends with my analysis of the Roswell documentation and how some of it is quite suggestive that nothing alien fell there, I thought it time to annoy all my skeptical friends. Lining up against that documentation is the testimony of some people who were on the scene in 1947. This is based on the documentation we can find about them and the stories they tell us in the world today.

Walter Haut, for example, either wrote the press release claiming the 509^th had found a flying saucer, or he took the dictation from Colonel William Blanchard to create the press release. At this point it doesn’t really matter. The press release

Walter Haut being interviewed.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

was issued and it claimed they had “captured” a flying saucer in the Roswell region. The definition of flying saucer confuses the issue, because in 1947, there was no universally accepted definition. It could mean almost anything you wanted it to mean. But here’s the deal. It is vague to the point of being opaque. We don’t know what it means.

I have never understood the reason for the press release. If Blanchard was attempting to grab credit for solving the flying disk mystery, the press release was unnecessarily obscure. Compare it to the story out of Circleville, Ohio, in which a farmer found the remains of a weather balloon and rawin reflector on his land. We have a story in the local paper that identifies the farmer as Sherman Campbell and includes what is claimed a picture of his wife. When I talked to the family, I learned it was actually his daughter holding the rawin target. The point is that the Circleville newspaper story was clear and it included a photograph. The Roswell press release told us nothing of real importance, provided little in the way of verification and had no photograph.

We do have testimony from Haut, which, if we limit it to what was said in the press release, and what he said to us for decades before expanding his story, we learn that what was found was something strange. No, it tells us nothing about the alien nature of the crash, just tells us that Blanchard and company were perplexed by something they should have been able to identify easily if it was a weather balloon. No reason not to supply the explanation if it was something mundane, like was done in Circleville.

If we wish to get to the extraterrestrial, then there is Edwin Easley, who was the provost marshal (please note the proper spelling of marshal here) in Roswell. When I asked him if we were following the right path, he asked what I meant by that. I told him that we (meaning Don Schmitt and I) believed that the craft had been extraterrestrial. He said, “Well, let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path.”

Taking that a step farther, he told family members about the alien “creatures.” That was his word to them, not mine. Sure, that statement is second hand at best because we learned it talking to family members, but hey, it does confirm his mindset on this.

No, there is no reason for Easley to have lied about it. He was very reluctant to talk, didn’t grant much in the way of interviews, and you won’t see him showing up in any of the old documentaries. I was always of the impression he wished to help me, but he had taken an oath in 1947 and he wasn’t going to break the oath.

There is Joe Briley, the operations officer in 1947. He said a couple of things that don’t take us directly to the extraterrestrial but do lead us to the highly unusual. He told me, when I mentioned, “…You heard the stories…” that “And then the story was changed immediately. As soon as the people from Washington arrived.”

Jesse Marcel

Yes, it is clear from the conversation on the tape that we’re talking about the UFO crash tale. I really don’t say anything specifically about it, but Briley knew why I had called him. In fact, later in the interview, he told me, “I just was not brought into that at all even though Butch [Blanchard] and I were extremely close.”

And later still, he said, “I don’t think Butch was stupid enough to call a weather balloon something else.”

Okay, this doesn’t get us to the extraterrestrial, but it does move us away from the conventional. It suggests things in Roswell were, well, up in the air in 1947.

I haven’t touched on Jesse Marcel, Sr. yet. He was quite clear in his statements about what had happened. There are any number of videos of him telling us that it was something “that wasn’t built on Earth but it had come to Earth.”

If he was stand alone, we could certainly dismiss his testimony. But it is not and while it is true that he seemed to drift all over the place before he died, he did say some provocative things about what he had seen and had done. These were backed up by his son and his wife. Still, we need to sound a note of caution when dealing with the senior Marcel.

Before this gets too long, let’s move onto Bill Brazel. Here was another man

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the debris field.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

extremely reluctant to talk about what he had seen. He did find a few scraps of the material that his father, Mack, described as having come from “that contraption I found.”

This debris included something that resembled fiber optics, a lead foil that seemed to have a memory, returning to its original shape when crumpled, and something that was as light a balsa but with a strength that rivaled steel. Although he lost the debris to Air Force personnel in 1949, he did show it to several others including Sallye Tadolini. Some of these witnesses, who handled the debris have affidavits about it.

Of course, Mack had shown a bit of the debris to Floyd and Loretta Proctor. She told me about the fire-resistant capabilities of the material. She mentioned, as did Marian Strickland, that Mack had been held by the military authorities for a number of days.

And I don’t want to forget Bill Rickett, the CIC NCOIC in Roswell in July 1947. He talked about his trip to see the crash site, some of the debris that he saw there, and some of the people on the scene including Sheridan Cavitt and Edwin Easley.

Here I could mention Frankie Rowe who wasn’t lying about what she said. True, she is second hand, having heard about the crash and the creatures from her father, fire fighter Dan Dwyer. But her sister confirmed the story and ironically, one of the fire fighters who Karl Pflock interviewed and used to dismiss the story,

Karl Pflock

actually told me, that Dwyer had gone to the crash site in his private car. The fire fighter, C.J. Smith, told me about Dwyer’s trip when I asked, simply, “Did you know Dan Dwyer.” Smith’s response was, “He went out there in his car.”

These are some of the things that I think about when I’m not worrying about the documents that I mentioned in the last post. Most of the people mentioned here, and a dozen or two more that I could have brought up argue against the documents conclusion. While it is true that a few people might be inventing their tales, and we’ve had more than our share of them, there are some very solid people who had talked about their involvement. If I’m willing to concede some points based on the documentation, it seems only right that those at the other end of the spectrum admit that there are some disturbing testimonies. They all aren’t lying, looking for their fifteen minutes, and just wishing to have an interesting story to tell.

Oh, and before this degenerates into another long discussion about the foibles of human memory… yeah, I get it. But not all memories are flawed and inaccurate. Many times, the person gets the facts right as has been shown by numerous scientific investigations, and yes, I know about Elizabeth Loftus’ work on false memory. Her work demonstrates how such memories can be created, so we don’t really have to talk about that. We just have to remember that sometimes, the person relating the tale has the details right, was actually there, and is telling the truth as best he or she can…

Chasing Notes... Sort Of...

Although this isn’t actually about chasing footnotes, it sort of began that way. I was trying to follow up on a comment about the Mantell crash and why it had happened. Nearly twenty years ago or so, I had a thought of creating a sort of peer review of UFO information using the Internet as the publishing vehicle as well as a way of getting that peer review. To that end, I selected the Mantell case because there was so much bad information about it out there, from the idea that he was an experienced fighter pilot and ace to the claim that he had seen some creatures inside the craft or that they had shot him down because he approached too close.

The idea failed because no one wanted to invest the time and effort in creating documents of length about a case, some of the needed information was still classified at various levels, or maybe they all just thought it was not worth the effort. Why work so hard on a sighting because no matter the conclusion and how honest you believed the results might be there would be others who would reject the word because it didn’t fit their personal belief structure? I suppose I should have known that it was doomed to failure, but sometimes we all get overly optimistic.

Anyway, I was pulling up information from a variety of sources just to see how it was treated in them. Skeptic Curtis Peeples in Watch the Skies didn’t actually explain the sighting but noted the Air Force had claimed Venus and others thought it might have been a weather balloon but investigation apparently couldn’t prove that. The one real contribution to the discussion was Peeples’ report that Mantell

Thomas Mantell.

had a mere 67 hours of flight time in the F-51D type aircraft he was flying and 2867 hours in transports. Peeples doesn’t mention it, but Mantell had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions during the Normandy invasion (D-Day for those of you who aren’t history buffs) in 1944. The point is that he was an experienced pilot but that his flight time in fighters was relatively low which might explain part of this.

I checked Richard Dolan’s UFO’s and the National Security State. Dolan suggested that Mantell was flying a P-51, which is the same aircraft as the F-51. The designation had been changed from “P” for pursuit to “F” for fighter, but many people make the mistake and it isn’t of much importance. He said that two of the other aircraft accompanied Mantell to 15,000 (while regulations required oxygen above 14,000) feet, but other documents suggested they climbed to 22,000 feet with Mantell.

Dolan quotes from Mantell’s last transmissions suggesting the object is above him and that is metallic and of tremendous size. He finally reports that the object is moving about his speed of maybe a little faster. According to Dolan, Mantell said that he was going to climb 20,000 feet and if he was no closer he would abandon the chase. The records seem to suggest that Mantell was already at 20,000 feet, and he was going to climb to 25,000 and circle for ten minutes before giving up. It is now clear to all of us, that if Mantell climbed to 25,000 feet he wouldn’t have had ten minutes of useful consciousness. He would have passed out in three to four minutes because of hypoxia.

The Air Force first claimed that Mantell had chased Venus, then a weather balloon and finally two weather balloons and Venus. Ed Ruppelt, when he took over as the chief of Project Blue Book concluded that Mantell might have been chasing a Skyhook balloon which could reach altitudes of nearly 100,000 feet, and given they were made of polyethylene, would have a metallic sheen in the bright sunlight. Ruppelt was unable to find a launch of one of those balloons on the proper date but there did seem to be one or two that might have been launched in the days preceding Mantell’s doomed flight.

Where Dolan goes astray, in the footnote sort of way is when he wrote, “Clifford Stone, a twenty-year U.S. Army veteran, has informed me that a navy colleague of his checked with the Office of Naval Research for Skyhook balloon plots. The man said that ONR records indicated there was definitely no launch of a Skyhook balloon from at least January 6 to January 8, 1948, but also that probably none had been launched since late December 1947.”

Here’s the problem, he mentions Cliff Stone, who is unreliable as a source on this, given the many unconfirmed tales he has told over the years. More importantly, Stone does not supply the name of his source, so not only is the information provided by Stone unverified, we aren’t provided with the name of this man with ONR. There is no way to check this out if Stone won’t supply the name.

Or, in other words, we can trace it from Dolan to Stone to a “navy colleague. That tells us nothing about where the information originated, about the accuracy of the information or what documentation exists to confirm it. The trail ends at that point. We need to ask Stone about it.

But here’s the point and it is one that we all too often ignore. We need to be able to trace the evidence to the original source so that we might be able to assess the credibility of that source. When I say, for example, that Edwin Easley suggested to me the path to the extraterrestrial was not the wrong path to follow in my investigation, we all could look at who he was. Easley, according to the documentation, was the provost marshal at Roswell in 1947 and was in a position to know. We can’t get beyond him, but we don’t need to. He was an eyewitness source who was clearly there in 1947. Unfortunately, in today’s world that information can’t be corroborated because he said it to me in an unrecorded conversation. He fell ill shortly after that and the opportunity was lost. You can accept it or reject based on your personal bias, but the point is, Easley was a named source who was in the right place at the right time. With Stone’s source we cannot verify his credentials, we don’t know if he was in the right place to gather the data claimed and that is the difference.

Those of us engaged in UFO research, regardless of the side of the fence we inhabit, must be willing to provide proper sourcing for what we say. We must name the names and the documents. Once that is done, we can all argue about the interpretation, but we must be willing to share all relevant data so that everyone can see where it originated. Otherwise we are just spinning our wheels.

Chester Barton and Roswell

It seems that we keep coming back to some of the same tired questions. No matter what is presented in the way of testimony, it seems that someone has an objection

Chester Barton in 1947.

to it. Lately it has been the idea that all the witnesses were contaminated by the publicity surrounding the Roswell case. Even when I was the first to talk with a witness, the comment seems to be that they had heard about or read about or seen something about the UFO crash so that their testimony is “born” contaminated.

In August 1995, Joe Stefula, who seems to be a skeptic for the alien visitation solution for Roswell was drawn into the investigation because, according to him, “I was retired, and Roswell seemed a chance to ‘play detective’ once again.”

Although he had been given a list of names by a fellow researcher, William P. LaParl, he had learned that most were dead but he did manage to “get Chester P. Barton on the telephone.”

Barton, though only a first lieutenant in 1947 had actually joined the Army in 1929 as an enlisted man. He was assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group and he served in the Army until 1954 when retired as a captain. According to Stefula, Barton “Had read none of the books, seen none of the TV programs and seemed entirely unaware of the controversy.”

Yes, I know. It does seem strange that a guy who had been assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in Roswell in 1947 would be so completely unware of the stories about the UFO crash. I was watching Bar Rescue a few months ago when they renovated a bar near Fort Bragg and one of the pictures of military operations they hung on the wall in the background was from the 116^th Assault Helicopter Company. I knew this because I recognized the insignia on the nose of the aircraft and I had been assigned to that unit. This was in the background and sort of flashed by but I caught it… Barton said he was oblivious to all that had been said about Roswell in 1947. I guess some people just don’t pay close attention.

Barton said that he had been ordered to report to Major Edwin Easley, who, as we all know, was the provost marshal in 1947. Easley told him to head out to the crash site to find out what was going on. He took a jeep carryall and drove out, taking about forty-five minutes to get there. He said that he passed through a checkpoint and the guards were apparently from the 1395^th MP Company which was stationed at Roswell.

He said that he was never really close to the wreckage. He saw parts that he believed were from a B-29 and that there was a burned area associated with the wreckage which suggests this was not out on the Brazel ranch (okay, Foster ranch). He said that no piece he could see was identifiable as parts of an airplane. He picked up nothing because the MPs warned him about possible radiation contamination which might have been a way of convincing people not to handle the wreckage.

He made a verbal report to Easley and there was nothing in writing. Easley told him to forget about the incident but he was not required to sign anything or given a verbal oath for secrecy. Just Easley’s comment about forgetting about it.

Barton, it seems, believed that what had happened was a B-29 crashed that had been carrying atomic bombs. He didn’t see any wreckage he recognized and I have never found an aircraft accident, whether experimental, civilian or military that crashed near Roswell at that time.

While Barton did not participate in the clean-up, he did drive out to the field, did see wreckage and formed his opinion on what had happened. He mentioned there wasn’t enough wreckage if it had been a B-29 unless it had broken up or that some of it had already been removed from the field. The Air Force, during their mid-1990s investigation determined that there was no aircraft accident that would account for the wreckage which eliminates Barton’s belief that it was a B-29.

But the point here is that people want to hear from others who were in the field and talked about what they saw. Barton is just another voice who saw something strange in 1947, didn’t get close enough to see if the wreckage was extremely unusual but did provide some information about the distance to the impact site, did mention debris, did suggest a burned area and that he wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Just another voice that provided a little in the way of first-hand testimony. 

Who is the Man in Adam Dew's Video?

The question that is being asked is who is the man in the Adam Dew video? Is there enough of him visible for us to make any sort of guess? I have studied this, compared it to the Richard Dolan video of a man who claimed to have been in Roswell and saw the bodies and to the picture of Eli Benjamin who appears in Tom Carey and Don Schmitt’s Witness to Roswell and it seems to be the same man.

Benjamin was a member of the 390^th Air Service Squadron, which was part of Edwin Easley’s command, meaning that they had the mission of security on the base. The 1395^th MP Company was used for patrolling the town and the like according to what Easley told me.

Of course, Eli Benjamin does not appear in the Roswell Yearbook and I would argue that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t there, only that he isn’t in the Yearbook. But, it turns out that he is under the name of PFC Eleazar Benavides.

The excuse for using a pseudonym was to protect the witness, and this I understand. As I have said before, there are too many people out there who have no sense of ethics or respect for privacy. They’ll call someone in the middle of the night to ask questions. They’ll say and publish rude things about the man because he said that he had seen an alien body. They’ll want to tell him why he is wrong.

But you really can’t have it both ways, especially once the man has agreed to a videotaped interview that is now on the Internet. It was conducted by Richard Dolan and you can view it to see if the man in the video reminds you of Benavides.

If you are going to cite the man’s story as evidence of the crash, then you have an obligation to provide the name of the witness. Anonymous testimony in the world today is useless. Highly places sources and insiders and others often used to provide a view of a story don’t help us much. We have reached the point where the names are required for the evidence to be worthwhile.…

Benavides was concerned that his pension would be revoked and while that might be a real concern to him, I know of no one who has lost a military pension because he or she talked about flying saucers, UFOs, crashed disks, or alien bodies. It would be interesting to see how the government would revoke a pension without revealing what crime the soldier had committed was. There would simply be no justification for it.

So, the point here is that I believe that the man on Adam Dew’s video clip, the man who ties the creature in the slides to Roswell is Eleazar Benavides. He seems to be sincere, but then so did Frank Kaufmann and Glenn Dennis. In the world today I don’t know how this will be received other than to say that it will take more than one former member of the 509^th to corroborate the appearance of the creature on the slides.… and yes, I get that this happened a long time ago and that those who actually saw bodies, if they existed, are probably now beyond our ability to interview them.

Citizen Hearing and Alien Bodies

At the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, Merrill Cook asked a question that, at the time was confusing for those of us facing him and his former congressional buddies. He wanted to know, as near as I can figure now, if anyone who claimed to have seen the bodies of the alien creatures had mentioned it in 1947. We all struggled with this as he kept talking about it and we thought of military men who had seen the bodies but who had said nothing until years later. We didn’t think of anyone who had talked about it in 1947, or how we could expect to find anything about that now?

The committee listening to testimony at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, D.C., May 2013.

Of course, a letter or diary that was written at the time would be one way, but the only diary I have ever found that was reliable was that of Ruth Barnett. There was nothing in it to suggest that Barney Barnett had seen anything unusual in 1947. Stan didn’t mention Gerald Anderson, I suspect because he was flanked by Don and me and he believed we would challenge that. Besides, Anderson had admitted to faking one document when confronted with the evidence of that forgery.

I looked at Don and he looked at me. We both thought of Edwin Easley, the provost marshal, but I had nothing from him to suggest he had talked about the bodies in 1947 to anyone. Sitting beside me was Jesse Marcel, Jr., but according to him, his father had never said anything to him about bodies.

The one person we didn’t think of at the time was Frankie Rowe. For this discussion, it doesn’t matter what you think of her tale, and I don’t really want to hear about Karl Pflock’s “evidence” that she wasn’t telling the truth. We know that some of his evidence has been debunked.

 

Frankie Rowe

Anyway, according to Rowe, her father, a fire fighter with the Roswell Fire Department, told her, and the family, that he had gone out to the crash site, and that he had seen the bodies of the alien creatures. Rowe said that her father described creatures as small and hairless.

 

This would have answered the question for Cook. Someone who, in 1947, talked about the alien creatures. One of the fire fighters, when interviewed several years ago, also mentioned that Dwyer, Rowe’s father, had told him, in 1947, some of what he had seen.

Granted, this is testimony gathered years after the event. Granted, it is all second hand. It does, however, answer the question as posed. Was there anyone who talked of the alien creatures at the time, meaning in 1947? The answer is, “Yes.”

Sometimes, we all get lost in the weeds. Neither Don nor I thought of Frankie Rowe in front of that committee. It would have been nice to have her sitting at the table to say, “Yes, my father told me about them that very night.” It would have been a powerful moment.

One that we lost.

Philip Corso Was Not The Highest-Ranking Officer to Talk

Sometimes you see something that just makes no sense. I stumbled across several web sites that proclaimed that Philip Corso was the highest-ranking officer to talk about Roswell. Overlooking that much of what Corso claimed has been discredited, let’s just deal with this other claim.

First, we must realized that Corso was not a colonel (known as an O6 in the military) but was a lieutenant colonel (known as an O5). Some believed that he was promoted upon retirement, as often happens in the reserve, but there is no documentation to support this, and while Corso held a reserve commission, he had spent his career on extended active duty (known as EAD in the world of the military). That he was known as a colonel is a mistake though he would be addressed as “colonel” and referred to as “colonel” in conversation, in formal correspondence he would be addressed as “lieutenant colonel.” His rank insignia would be a silver leaf while that for a colonel is a silver eagle.

Second, there are two brigadier generals, Thomas DuBose and Arthur Exon who have spoken about the Roswell case. DuBose was General Ramey’s Chief of Staff (and not his aide as he has been identified on some of the sites) and told us about transferring debris from Roswell, through Fort Worth and onto Washington, D.C. He also said, on tape, that the material in Ramey’s office was parts of a weather balloon and not what had been found outside of Roswell and sent on to higher headquarters.

Exon was a lieutenant colonel at Wright Field in 1947 and later, as a brigadier general was the base commander at Wright-Patterson AFB (think of this as a mayor of a good-sized city). He told us (and here I think of me along with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey) about what he had seen and heard about Roswell, including flying over the crash site. His information about the case was both direct and indirect.

Third, there are Colonels... Patrick Saunders and Edwin Easley who were both at the base in Roswell in July 1947, and both who retired in a higher grade than Corso. Saunders is responsible for a notation in one of the Roswell books that I wrote with Don Schmitt that suggested that the cover up was in place, that it was an alien craft, and that he hadn’t mentioned it.

Easley was the provost marshal (think chief of police and please notice the spelling with but a single “L”) in Roswell and was responsible for the security at the crash site (whatever that crash might have been). He told me, in a private interview, that he believed it to be of an extraterrestrial craft. Yes, that’s a paraphrase of his saying that we weren’t following the wrong path when I said we believed it to be extraterrestrial.

When you look at it, you see that there are at least four officers of superior rank, who were actually in the right places to see something useful and not at Fort Riley in Kansas in July 1947. (I should point out here that I have nothing against lieutenant colonels, I was promoted to that grade upon retirement and that I spent three months at Fort Riley in 2003.)

Corso spun an interesting story, but the facts are he was not the highest ranking officer to talk about this, he was not in the right place to see anything in 1947, and there were gaps in his knowledge that would suggest he knew no more about this than someone who had read a few of the books and viewed some of the web sites. His story is interesting, but has little relevance to our understanding of the Roswell case.

Brazel in Custody in Roswell

As the debate in the last posting rages, and as we race toward 300 comments on it, there was one discussion in the debate that demonstrates the original point. I had suggested that we look at the evidence in a dispassionate matter. Instead, in some cases, it became a rejection of evidence because of a belief that such things just couldn’t happen.

Some of the skeptics have rejected the idea that Mack Brazel had been held by military authorities for about a week. Christopher Allan, for example, wrote:

Karl Pflock [seen here] went into the question of Brazel in his book, p.169-171. He concluded that it was very doubtful if such incarceration took place. But ETHers will insist it did. What on earth would they need a whole week to detain him for anyway? If they were determined to silence him they could do it in maybe 2 hours by getting him to sign a secrecy oath on July 8. That supposes the affair was already classified top secret. In which case he wouldn't have been permitted to even give his RDR [Roswell Daily Record] interview later that day.

But Karl Pflock is not the final authority on this, and in fact, he dismissed some data simply because he didn’t like it. That it agreed with the skeptical attitude doesn’t make it right. Let’s look at some of the facts.

Karl pointed out that I hadn't recorded the conversation with Easley, which is true. But I do have my notes written at the time, meaning as I was talking to Easley. About Brazel at the base Easley said (quoting from my notes and seen here), "Brought him to base... talked to him for several days... not involved in that (Easley saying that he was not involved in the interrogation). Brazel at the guest house."

This was, of course, the "top cop" at the Roswell base and who had not been interviewed by anyone until I talked to him. He was careful in what he said because, as he told me repeatedly, "I’ve been sworn to secrecy." (Which is an argument for a later time and one that I do have on tape.)

Not to mention that Pflock is, in essence, calling me a liar about this testimony. Yes, I sincerely wish I had it on tape, but that doesn’t change the fact that Easley said it to me and I was the first, and as far as I know, the only researcher to have talked to him... Karl presented nothing to refute this testimony other than mention it wasn’t on tape... just like some of the interviews he conducted but which he says he reported accurately.

Then we reject what Bill Brazel said about seeing the stories about his father in the newspapers and going out to the ranch to help him. Mack returned two or three days after Bill got there. Testimony provided by Brazel during my first interview with him in 1989.

Then we reject Marian Strickland, who actually said on video tape (I made the recording in 1990) that Mack sat in her kitchen and complained about being held in Roswell. (Lyman Strickland also said this but not to me. He had died before I traveled to Roswell.)Then we reject what Loretta Proctor said about Brazel being held in Roswell... As well as the testimony of several others who saw him in Roswell including Floyd Proctor and even Walt Whitmore, Jr. who said he saw Brazel at his father’s house, not to mention his being at the newspaper office sometime on July 8 to give the interview. Which, I point out again, puts Brazel in Roswell after his initial visit.

Floyd Proctor told Bill Moore, as reported in The Roswell Incident, about seeing Brazel in Roswell being escorted by the military. Now, given that Bill Moore described his own book as a "disgraceful hodgepodge of fact and fiction," and given that we have seen him manipulate witness testimony to fit his vision of events, skeptics would be well within their rights to reject these statements attributed to Floyd Proctor. And, if Proctor was stand alone, I would reject it as well.

However, I do know that some of the testimony reported in The Roswell Incident was accurate because the witnesses told me the same thing. And, Loretta confirms what her husband said. So, we can, if we want suggest this testimony is accurate. We might assign less weight to it than that given by other witnesses and reported by other writers, but it still has some value in the overall understanding of the Roswell case.

We also reject the testimony of other Brazel friends, Leonard Porter and Bill Jenkins, who talked of Brazel under military escort.

And, we reject the story told by Frank Joyce about Brazel visiting him, at KGFL in Roswell after he had been to the newspaper office. Brazel told Joyce that he was under orders to give this new tale or it would go very hard on him. We reject this because Joyce’s story has grown over the years... however, when I first interviewed Joyce, he made it clear that there were things he knew that he just hadn’t mentioned to anyone. In fact, he showed me a letter he had sent to himself, which was postmarked so that he could verify that he hadn’t "just remembered" or that he was now embellishing his account. But reject him anyway.

We accept what Bessie Brazel said, even though she said that she had accompanied her father into Roswell on the first trip and didn't remember the military following him back out (which is fairly well documented... I mean even Cavitt admitted that he went out to the ranch, which, of course directly contradicts her). She said that her father didn't return to Roswell, even though that also is documented. She said that no military came out to the ranch.

She also said that she knew it was a balloon when they gathered up the material, all of it, leaving none in the field for Cavitt and Marcel to see. It strikes me that if a 14-year-old girl could identify this as a balloon, why then Jesse Marcel, an adult with intelligence training, surely would have recognized it... but I digress.

So, what this means is that we reject all the evidence from several different sources including documents and testimony that does not support our point of view and accept the statements from a single source, even when that source has been contradicted by documentation, because it does.

Not to mention that Bessie Brazel herself repudiated the testimony. Said that she had confused the 1947 event with something that happened a couple of years later. So, even she isn’t sure about all this, but her story suggests balloon and nothing extraordinary so she is considered right and everyone else is wrong.

And now I have to hear, again, about how Karl Pflock had refuted the idea that Brazel was held in Roswell... The evidence shows that he was. Period. The length of time is an estimate based on what Bill said. That he arrived two or three days after his father left and his father return two or three days later. Four to six or seven days based on the man who should know.

These would be facts and no, they do not lead to the extraterrestrial but do suggest something out of the ordinary happened. The point here is that the skeptics are flat out wrong on this point. It will interesting to see if they will attempt to spin it in some fashion.

CSICOP (I mean CSI)

Let’s talk for a moment about CSICOP which has changed it’s name to CSI which I suppose it a marketing ploy to snag the unwary. I mean, if you type CSI into your search engine, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many do and have, you’ll eventually find your way to what used to be CSICOP. They’re probably less than pleased to have me decode their plan.

CSICOP, which originally stood for Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (a worthy endeavor) is now know as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, another worthy endeavor. Unfortunately, my experience with them, and the experience of others suggest that they are more of an advocacy group rather than an organization that investigates the paranormal, including UFOs. They would rather make pronouncements about the non existence of these phenomena than actually investigate them. And it seems when the few investigations they conduct provide no real answer, they are willing to accept any conclusion as long as it does not suggest the reality of a paranormal phenomena (With the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting, they continue to offer solutions that make no sense. Recently it was suggested that Arnold had seen B-47s in flight. None of the skeptics, and here it wasn’t a CSI explanation, bothered to learn that the first B-47 hadn’t flown until December, 1947, six months AFTER Arnold made his report.)

Just what does this mean? Well, in one of the anti-Roswell UFO crash books CSICOP, I mean CSI, published, the author wrote, "Finally as the pro-UFO Roswell researchers will admit when pressed, Beverly Bean is the only person in the Brown family who has made these claims about her father. Bean’s sister and her own mother have never confirmed the account."

The Brown in this statement in Melvin Brown who was a sergeant assigned to the Roswell base in 1947 as a cook. He told family members that he had seen the bodies of the aliens killed in the crash, but for several years only his daughter, Beverly Bean, made this claim. Later Brown’s widow, and his other daughter, confirmed that they had heard her husband and their father make similar statements.

The CSICOP inspired statement, is, of course, not true and since the author referenced the 1991 interview conducted with the Brown family (video taped by Brad Radcliffe), he should have known that both Bean’s sister and her mother confirmed the account on video tape. So, even though he must have known the truth but rather than writing, "In 1991, both Bean’s sister and mother who had failed to corroborate the story earlier, are now on the record..." he chose to conceal this evidence from his readers.

This withholding of information is exactly the same thing that the writer had been complaining that I, as well as my colleagues, had been doing. And while I can show, repeatedly, how I attempted to present all the information about the case, allowing the reader to make up his or her mind about the validity of the case, CSI, through this writer was not engaging in scientific analysis, but was involved in a debate. In debate, you never give the other side information favorable to its argument. You allow them to find it on their own.

In on
e more example, on page 91, the author wrote, "After initially refusing to confirm to Randle that he was even there at Roswell, Randle claims that Easley [that would be Major Edwin Easley, seen here, who was the provost marshal Roswell in 1947], on his deathbed, eventually confessed that not only had he "been there," but that he had also seen bodies."
This is a mishmash of testimony and statements. In my initial conversation with Easley, he not only confirmed he had been there, but that he was the provost marshal. In the taped interview conducted on January 11, 1990, I said, "I’m doing some research into the 509th Bomb Group and I understand you were the Provost Marshal there at one time."

Easley said, "That’s right."

I said, "At the 509th?"

He said, "Yes."

And I said, "During July of 1947?"

And he said, "Yes."

I wrote to CSI and asked them, based on their claims of scientific investigation, if they shouldn’t be held to a higher standard than a publisher of books on the paranormal. I mean, if you look at Berkley Books, for example, you’ll find that they publish books on both sides of the controversy. I suspect they don’t do this because they want to provide both sides of the case but because there are business reasons for it. Berkley Books, like so many other publishers, desire to make money and make their publishing decisions based on that.

CSI, h
owever, publishes books only on one side. Karl Pflock told me once that CSI (when it was still known as CSICOP) refused to publish his Roswell in Perspective because it wasn’t skeptical enough. Not that the information might be inaccurate, or that there might be flaws in the reasoning, but because its tone wasn’t skeptical enough. Eventually they published it as Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe.

You might wondering, by now, what was CSI’s response to my inquiry. Well, there hasn’t been one. They have never really responded to anything I asked of them. The main example comes from the late Phil Klass. We corresponded regularly over the years. We traded barbs a number of times and I have often thought that Phil got backed into his anti-saucer and therefore anti-Roswell corner in the 1960s. Phil came up with the idea that ionized air, glowing in the night, was the cause of UFO sightings. The idea was quickly killed by physicists, and Phil went on to other, similar ridiculous explanations but he had become the resident UFO expert.

In the 1990s I hosted a radio show on KTSM radio in El Paso, Texas (as seen here). The topic was the paranormal, and Phil appeared on the show a couple of times. I asked for others from CSICOP (as it was kno wn then) but never got any response. Phil said he’d arrange some interviews, but no one ever came on. I thought this a strange response from a group of skeptics who wanted to get their message out.

My philosophy on the show was to allow the guest to make his or her point, talk with the listeners, and to defend his or her points of view. I was more of a facilitator than a participant. If the guest had a point of view I didn’t like, well, it was his or her opinion and on the next show we might discuss that or move on to another topic.

Irene Hughes, one of the most celebrated psychics in the country appeared once. During a commercial break, she commented that I was protecting my guest very well. I figured if she was a good psychic, she’d be able to defend herself and didn’t need me to step in. Her comment sort of annoyed me because when the tables were reversed, meaning I was on someone else’s show, I always felt it was my job to defend my position rather than rely on the host.

I will note here, apropos of nothing at all, that I asked Hughes who was going to win the Super Bowl. There were four teams left in the running because the companionship games had yet to be played. She said it would be the Packers. After she left the show, I said, on the air, and recorded on tape, "Everyone knows its going to be the Cowboys over the Steelers by 11." In fact, it was the Cowboys over the Steelers by 10 (27 to 17 if you must know). She didn’t even get the two teams right and I missed the spread by a single point.

The point here, however, is that I provided the guest a chance to present his or her point of view without a challenge from me. CSICOP (or CSI) had nothing to fear from me and Phil Klass did the show a couple of times. No one else from CSI even bothered to respond to my invitations.

So I’m not surprised that they didn’t answer my question about having a higher standard. It is clear from some of the books they have published that reality means little to them. Debunking is their business so why allow facts to get in the way.

I could, of course, support their cause because I have debunked my share of stories. I have provided answers to mysteries when I have them. But I do not create answers out of nonsense, I do not invent witness testimonies that do not exist, and I do not enter an investigation believing in one answer because that answer happens to be my favorite. I can, of course, provide more examples of CSI caring little for the truth but there is no point.

And I will mention, once again, that yes, those of us on the other side of the fence are often guilty of selective use of the data (cherry-picking it), or of leaping to far-ranging conclusions, but we do not hold ourselves up as an authority whose only mission is to explain the nearly inexplicable. We don’t claim to be the only rational thinkers on the planet with a self-selected mandate to remove the paranormal, the unusual, or the exotic from the minds of those too dumb, stupid or ignorant to see the light.

CSI does and with that comes an obligation to get it right. Tell us that UFOs don’t exist, that the evidence for the Roswell UFO crash is thin, but don’t wrap that pronouncement around poor research, sloppy investigation and half-truths. Make your case without a superior attitude and you probably will have an easier time with it.

CSI won’t answer questions. They will not consider alternative answers which explains why they believe some of the dumbest things on the face of the planet. Oh, it removes the extraterrestrial from the discussion but it certainly doesn’t explain anything.

(Yes, I know you all want to know what I mean. Remember Lonnie Zamora, the New Mexico police officer who saw a landed UFO and two occupants back in the 1960s? Well, Phil Klass explained the case. Zamora and the mayor of tiny Socorro, New Mexico were attempting to create a tourist interest in their town and would build a museum close to the site where the UFO was spotted... on land already owned by the mayor. No evidence of this ever surfaced, but to many in CSI, the Socorro case is explained as a hoax. It is not.)

CSI should do a better job of policing themselves and they shouldn’t accept a solution because it is mundane rather than exotic. They should take their own advice and they should do what they originally set out to do, which is investigate claims of the paranormal... Oh, wait, they took that out of their name. Now they’re just the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. I guess investigation was too tough for them. Now they’ll just ask questions and ignore the answers they don’t like. They have become what they have accused us on the other side of becoming... True Believers... The evidence be damned.

I Understand Kent Jeffrey

Back in the mid-1990s, airline pilot Kent Jeffrey (in th red shirt with Tom Carey center, and Colonel Jeffrey on right) developed an interest in the Roswell case. He believed, at that time, that something alien had fallen there and that the cover up of it should be broken. He believed that we all had the right to know what happened and he was willing to put up some of his own money and his own time in an attempt to learn the truth.

He began the Roswell Initiative which was a worldwide petition to the US government to release all its Roswell information and all its UFO files. He put it online and he gave copies to friends in other countries to demonstrate the worldwide interest in learning the truth. He met with the witnesses and offered them the services of a legal team if they got into trouble for telling what they knew. He traveled to Roswell to meet them.

About the time that we arrived at the 50th anniversary of the crash, in July 1997, Kent had changed his mind. He believed that the Roswell crash, if there was anything at all, was caused by something mundane. He no longer thought of it as extraterrestrial and he appeared on several radio and television shows explaining why he had changed his mind. I debated him in a couple of those forums and responded, at length, to his article about what he thought of as the "real" truth that appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal.

He did complete his Initiative and delivered some twenty or thirty thousand petitions to Washington, but included a letter that watered down the whole thing. It sort of undermined the power of the petitions by saying that he now believed Roswell was explained, but there were still UFO truths to be learned.

I won’t go into all of that here. In wrote about it in the Roswell Encyclopedia, including Kent’s article. He granted permission to use it and though I edited it slightly because of space limitations, I didn’t change it. For those who wish to read this, they can do so in that book.

I will note, however, that one of Kent’s reasons for changing his mind was because he had attended some of the 509th Bomb Group reunions, talking with officers who served in Roswell in 1947 and who said they had heard nothing about the UFO crash. They said that had it happened, they would have known.

I don’t believe that is right, given the nature of security regulations and how these things work. I believe that if the crash was highly classified, many of these officers might have heard rumors, but they wouldn’t have been involved in the retrieval and now, fifty and sixty years later can provide us with nothing more than their opinion that nothing happened. Kent thought this persuasive. I do not.

It was Frank Kaufmann who might have killed it all for Kent, though I don’t know this for certain. I know that Kent, and his father, a World War II triple ace, meaning he shot down, at least, fifteen enemy aircraft, met with Frank on a couple of occasions in Roswell. Frank told them the same story that he had told me and others. He talked of his hobnobbing with generals, and mentioned General Robert Thomas who had sneaked into Roswell in the guise of a warrant officer... or, at least that was what Frank said.

But Kent’s father was a retired, high-ranking Air Force officer and had friends who could check all this out. He could find no evidence of this General Thomas and this, I believe made Kent suspicious.

Given all this, I believe Kent decided that there couldn’t have been a crash because he would have been able to get something from these officers at the reunions. He would have found some trace of this General Thomas even if the general would corroborate any of the story. And his failure to find independent corroboration of the crash beyond those in Roswell talking about it suggested to him that there had been no crash.

I think Kent was further disillusioned by some of the "revelations" about Major Jesse Marcel. Marcel’s entire military record was leaked into the public arena in violation of the 1974 Privacy Act. You can read the story of Marcel in the Archive in the April 2007 list on this blog.

And he had talked with officers who had been at Wright Field or who had been part of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) and who told him that nothing happened. Kent believed this to be the truth, though had there been a crash and had they been ordered not to talk about it, they very possibly would have said nothing happened. The lies told would be lies to protect national security and would therefore be part of the job.

I talked to a general who had been the chief of ATIC, or had overseen a larger part of the intelligence operation at Wright-Patterson AFB and when I asked him some questions he said, not kindly, "I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what is still classified and what is no longer classified and I can’t talk to you."

For a few moments more I tried to ask questions but it was clear that he wasn’t going to tell me anything. Does this prove a cover up in Roswell? No, it proves that there are military secrets and some are better at keeping them than others.

Kent didn’t get a chance to talk to Edwin Easley or Chester Barton, who worked for Easley and only had a couple of interesting things to say about the crash. He didn’t talk to Marcel but he was concerned about the contradictions in the Marcel’s military record and what Marcel had told Bob Pratt. He was concerned with the denials of men who claimed if something had happened, they would have known it, never understanding that sometimes military secrecy trumps friendship and those who thought they would have known were not inside the loop and they didn’t know.

I think Kent’s attempts to validate the information failed him and he lost some of his confidence in the Roswell case. I think that learning that Kaufmann was not who he claimed to be before we knew it for a fact, shook him. I think that learning that Glenn Dennis’s nurse didn’t exist under the name Dennis gave us, eliminated one of the better testimonies that led to the extraterrestrial. At the end of the day, there just wasn’t sufficient evidence for Kent to conclude that Roswell was alien. The Air Force explanation, the failure of so many of the eyewitnesses, and the damage done by those inventing their tales was enough for Kent. He concluded that Roswell was nothing alien.

I understand this because I too think some of the same things at times. Rumors should have circulated at Roswell among the pilots and surely some of them would have heard enough to suggest the crash was real. But I also know, having served with various military units that some secrets simply do not leak and sometimes those who think they have an inside track do not.

And while I might sometimes have my doubts about all Marcel said, when we look at his record we see a fine officer. Some of the things he told Bob Pratt are not borne out in the record, but then, it is possible that Pratt got some of it wrong. I do know the words are important and that Marcel never claimed his was a pilot as some have reported but said only that he had flown as one, and that is an important difference.

And I have watched the collapse of some testimony. Gerald Anderson was clearly making it up. It wasn’t quite as clear with Frank Kaufmann, but he too, was making it up. Glenn Dennis seemed to have a solid tale, but there were little things that went wrong with it. We learned the truth about him when he began to blame others for misunderstanding about the nurse’s name. The destruction there was more subtle, but when he began to say he had made up the nurse’s name, it reset everything to zero. Not quite as evident as Frank’s faked documents but enough to suggest Dennis was no more honest about this than Kaufmann.

So Kent looked at all this and decided that it was evidence that nothing alien happened. It could be explained as the Air Force said it could. Kent just couldn’t find sufficient evidence otherwise.

When I looked at this cesspool of useless evidence, I sometimes thought the same things. But then, I did talk to Edwin Easley and Chester Barton and a dozen others. I know what Easley told me but circumstances prevented a recording of the critical statement. For Kent that was a failure, but I heard what the man said. I can’t prove it for others, but I do know what was said.

And, I haven’t even touched on what Brigadier General Arthur Exon (seen here) told me. Yes, the debunkers and the Air Force have had little to say about him. So there are those who talk of something alien and who are who they claimed to be and who just might know something about it.

All that was too late for Kent. And if I hadn’t had the chance to talk to some of these people, then I might just agree with him. But I did talk to them, and I have talked to others, so I’m not as jaded as he has become. I can understand how it happened and the difference between the two of us is that I talked to some of the people he didn’t.

Edwin Easley and Roswell

Let’s talk about Major Edwin Easley (seen here), who, in 1947 was the provost marshal at the Roswell Army Air Field. That is, he was the top cop, sort of the chief of police, responsible for base security, patrols of the town, investigation of crimes, and any other security measure that the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, might have had for him. If there had been a UFO crash near Roswell, Easley would have known about it and would have had some role in the recovery operation, even if that role was only providing security on the crash sites.

The debunker triumvirate of Phil Klass, Karl Pflock and Kal Korff are quite dismissive of Easley, spending little or no time with his story. They seem to be of the opinion that he is of little value and that what he told me in several interviews is irrelevant because it is unsubstantiated and uncorroborated. Such is not the case.

(And, if I might go off on a tangent here, I use the word debunker, not in its normal connotation, but as it has become applied to the rabid disbelievers in the UFO field. Debunker means someone who will not change his or her opinion about the possibility of UFOs regardless of the evidence, just as the true believer will accept anything and everything, regardless of the evidence. Debunkers and true believers are at opposite ends of the spectrum but are equally unwilling to examine evidence.)

Phil Klass, in his anti-Roswell book doesn’t even mention Easley. Karl Pflock (seen below), in his, mentions him a number of times, mostly as identification of who he was and his job in Roswell in 1947, meaning simply that he was the provost marshal. Pflock does write in the one place, "...Roswell AAF provost marshall [sic], told Randle that Brazel ‘was kept under guard in the [base] guest house for a number of days."

Pflock also wrote, "All this [meaning the story of Brazel at the guest house and Brazel under military escort] seems quite impressive until we learn that Randle did not record his interview with Easley and has no independent verification of what he recalls the now-deceased officer told him."

Kal Korff has the most to say about Easley, but doesn’t get things exactly right. Korff wrote, "Randle claims that Easley on his deathbed eventually confessed that not only had he ‘been there,’ but that he had also seen alien bodies. Indeed, the authors [Randle and Schmitt] write, ‘Easley was reluctant to talk of bodies, but finally, before he died, said that he had seen them. He had been close enough to them to know they weren’t human. He called them creatures.’"

Korff continued, "There’s a problem with Randle’s claim about Easley’s alleged deathbed statements. To be blunt about the matter, Kevin Randle was not present when Easley was dying, only his family members were. This means that Kevin Randle is not in a position to comment about what Easley supposedly said because he wasn’t there.

"The truth of the matter is that there is no evidence other than Kevin Randle’s ‘word’ that Major Easley either said or did the things that Randle claims. And because Major Easley is deceased, he cannot be questioned on the accuracy of Randle’s comments.

"When I checked with the Center for UFO Studies, where Randle and Schmitt claim that all the interview tapes and documentation for their research are archived, it turned out that there are no tapes or forms of independent documentation or verification on file proving that Easley indeed had made the statements Randle posthumously attributes to him! Researchers Robert Todd and Stanton Friedman have also tried to obtain similar supportive evidence for many of Randle’s other claims regarding his research into Roswell but have been unsuccessful.

"Even if Kevin Randle is telling the truth regarding what Easley told him, there is a very valid reason to call into question any remarks that Easley might have made. According to Easley’s family, he was quite advanced in age when he spoke with Randle. His memory was failing him and Easley had a tendency to place himself in events at which he was not present."
Korff footnotes this with, "Kal Korff interview with Dr. Harold Granich, Easley’s physician, July 16, 1994."

In conclusion, Korff wrote, "Once again, until Kevin Randle is ever able to provide evidence and/or documentation to back up his statement, Easley’s alleged deathbed remarks cannot be considered as credible evidence for the extraterrestrial nature of the Roswell incident."

So, we are treated to two divergent views. We can ignore Phil Klass because he ignored Edwin Easley. Let’s look at what Karl Pflock has to say, remembering that Pflock never talked to Easley, never interviewed him, and is left with his impressions based on the work of others, most notably me.

Easley, in an interview with me, conducted from the offices of the Center of UFO Studies, told me that Mack Brazel, the rancher who brought in the debris had been held in the base guest house for a number of days. Is this uncorroborated?

No. Bill Brazel (seen here), Mack’s son, told me in personal interviews, including those that were recorded, that his dad had been held in Roswell for several days. Bill said that he had gone to the ranch and his father didn’t return for two or three days.

Marian Strickland, a neighbor to Brazel, told me, and is recorded on video tape, that he sat in her kitchen and complained about being held in jail. While the base guest house isn’t exactly jail, if you are not allowed to leave, it is the same sort of thing.

So, in reality, we have Easley’s statement and we have the recorded statements of others. Clearly Brazel was held in Roswell, and the importance of what Easley said, was that he was held in the guest house (seen below). This seems to be corroboration of what Easley told me.

Pflock also laments that I didn’t record one of the interviews with Easley and in reality, that was a serious mistake. At the time I talked to Easley, he was in good health and I planned to meet with him in person to corroborate all those things he had said. Dr. Mark Rodeghier of the CUFOS asked me to arrange a meeting between him and Easley and I attempted to do just that. Unfortunately, this was after Easley became seriously ill and a very good opportunity was lost.

Korff is the one who takes this the farthest, but his reporting is as flawed as the others. First, he is worried because I wasn’t there, in Easley’s room, to hear his statements. This, he believes, somehow negates them. But, if this is true and we are not allowed to interview others about their experiences, then historical research has been eliminated. Walter Lord was not on Titanic when it sank, so why should we believe anything he wrote about that. Because he talked to those who were there.

I might add, as an aside, that Lord interviewed the survivors some four decades after the sinking but no one has rejected his work because memories are flawed and dimmed by time. This is only a criticism that is raised in relation to UFO sightings, and then only about those claiming to have seen something strange and unusual. If the witness is saying that the event didn’t happen or there is a prosaic explanation for it, then that witnesses memories are fine.

Korff then suggested that there is no evidence that Easley ever said the things I said he said, forgetting that there are audio tapes of some of the interviews. Later, on the same page, Korff suggests that even if Easley did say these things, it doesn’t matter because, "According to Easley’s family, he was quite advanced in age when he spoke with Randle. His memory was failing him and Easley had a tendency to place himself in events at which he was not present."

Korff references this to the interview with Dr. Harold Granich, Easley’s physician, July 16, 1994. Not to the family so we don’t really know if the family said that or not. In fact, in all my communications with the family, this is the only place that this particular question has been raised.

On the other hand, we learn from an interview that Mark Rodeghier conducted with the same doctor, though Rodeghier spells the name, "Granik" that he had something different to say about it. According to this interview, Granik is an eye surgeon and not an oncologist. Granik told Rodeghier, according the notes I have from him, "A few weeks before he died of cancer... his granddaughter asked him about the events at Roswell. He broke his vow of silence long enough to say, ‘Oh, the creatures,’ before lapsing into silence. Other family members were present when he said this. Granik believes that Easley was lucid when he made the remark, because the disease did not cause any general deterioration of his mental faculties."

This is quite a contrast to what Korff reports he learned from the same man. But more importantly, this conversation does not rest on my shoulders. It comes from a different source so it is corroboration of what I wrote about Easley. It also means that Korff’s statement, "Once again, until Kevin Randle is ever able to provide evidence and/or documentation to back up his statement, Easley’s alleged deathbed remarks cannot be considered as credible evidence," can be reevaluated because there is other evidence available. By the way, I didn’t offer then as deathbed remarks.

Now, just for fun, let’s take a look at Korff’s statement, "Researchers Robert Todd and Stanton Friedman have also tried to obtain similar supportive evidence for many of Randle’s other claims regarding his research into Roswell but have been unsuccessful." This isn’t exactly true.

Mark Rodeghier called me and said that Robert Todd wanted copies of everything the Center had on the Roswell case. Knowing Todd, I’m sure that he would have paid the costs of copying the material. He always did, at the very least, make a token effort to acknowledge these costs.

I told Mark that I had no objection to his reviewing that material in the Chicago office but I would prefer that it wasn’t all copied and handed out. A lot of work and expense had gone into obtaining it and I wasn’t keen on handing it out to anyone who asked. Of course, Mark could have done it anyway because I had supplied it to the Center for its research library. So, it wasn’t that the Center didn’t have the material, it was that they wouldn’t copy it all and send it along to Todd. Not quite the same thing as Korff suggests.

The Friedman statement is a little strange because, in 1992, as we all discussed the various witnesses and the credibility of those witnesses, a conference was scheduled to be held in Chicago. All the parties were requested to supply their tapes, notes, transcripts and other materials to the other side for review prior to the conference. In other words, I had copied the stuff and sent it on to Friedman, so he had a great deal of it, not to mention the stuff that I had already shared with him. Some of it appears in his book, sometimes without attribution.

In The Plains of San Agustin Controversy, July 1947, published by the Center and the Fund for UFO Research in June 1992, we learn, from Dr. Michael Swords, "Regarding supplying the requested information to all parties... unlike the other more mechanical or schedule-driven areas of protocol, there were serious problems in this area. Unfortunately, in my view this was the most significant area of protocol to the fact-finding and case-discussion mission of this summit. One cannot discuss the facts or documentation of the case unless one can examine them personally and in a timely manner [emphasis in the original]. To my best estimation, Randle and Schmitt were asked for many things that they supplied in a highly organized and professional form to conference attendees in a timely manner. I heard no complaints about their manner of submission nor about the materials prepared by Tom Carey.

"Materials requested of Friedman and Berliner (and associates) were a different manner. Many, apparently most, of the specific requests were not supplied prior to the conference. On the initial evening of the meeting, Fred Whiting, Mark Rodeghier, and myself attempted in a friendly executive manner to rectify this problem by creating a mechanism for photocopying documents, dubbing video and audiotapes for the conferees’ use on the following two days. Friedman agreed to this, but nothing substantial came of it. Berliner, God bless him, located one tape he was carrying, and when it was brought up for discussion immediately loaned it for dubbing."

What is the point of mentioning all this. Well, it demonstrates that Friedman had gotten cooperation from us, I had sent him tapes and transcripts, so this suggestion in Korff’s book is slightly misleading.

What this all means is that the information I reported about Easley is accurate and has been corroborated by other members of the family, by others who had some sort of information that was relevant, and even by one of the sources Korff mentioned. Also interesting are the contradictory statements by Dr Granik, who said that Easley was lucid in the last days of his life (or that he tended to place himself in events when he hadn’t participated).

But there is one other, interesting fact. Easley told me he had been sworn to secrecy about this event. If true, one wonders why, if the answer about the UFO crash is mundane, Easley would have been ordered not to speak about it. (And no, Project Mogul doesn’t work here because, two days after the press release claiming that the RAAF had captured a flying saucer, pictures of a Mogul array were printed in the newspapers... the equipment and launches weren’t classified, just the name and the purpose, something slightly different than the debunkers tell you. Pictures ofMogul in the newspaper in July 1947.)

I have a statement written by Easley himself that says, "This is information on the 1947 incident north of Roswell, New Mexico, AFB. Being sworn to secrecy, I could not and did not give any information to the investigator. This case was presented on T.V. Unsolved Mysteries in September 1989." It’s quite clear here what Easley meant and this is another bit of corroboration and documentation. Stan Friedman can confirm this.

Here’s where we are. No one interviewed Easley except me. I have tapes of some of the interviews, but I don’t of the one where Easley confirmed the extraterrestrial nature of the craft. Family members did hear him say things about the craft and bodies, and some of this discussion took place prior to his eventual decline and death in the hospital. Believe me or don’t, but this doesn’t rest on my shoulders alone. There are others who heard the statements and have reported on them. Attempts to dismiss Easley’s testimony are simply that, attempts to dismiss his testimony. They are without substance and are made because we all know that a UFO didn’t crash at Roswell and anyone who says it did must by lying, deluded, or both.