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…

Lee Reeves and the Roswell UFO Crash

I know that this might seem to be piling on, but in the last couple of weeks, I have been asked about the story of Lee Reeves who supposedly accompanied Dan Dwyer out to the crash site where the alien creatures were found. Reeves’ tale appears in Witness to Roswell where it says, “When the call came in to the fire station that there had been a crash north of town, Dan Dwyer and Lee Reeves were dispatched

Dan Dwyer and members of the Roswell Fire Department.

with the station’s “tanker” (a pickup truck with a large, cylindrical water tank in the back) to the crash site. Arriving before the military could secure the site, Dwyer and Reeves got to see what had crashed. It wasn’t an airplane at all, but an egg-shaped vessel of some sort that they did not recognize. And the bodies! ...”

From that point, Carey and Schmitt described, from Dwyer’s point of view (which is not to say they were quoting him, only using information that had been supplied by Frankie Rowe about what her father had said), that the creatures were small and that eventually Dwyer saw one that was still alive. When he got home that night, he told the family what he had seen and was asked what the creatures looked like. His “answer was succinct, ‘Child of the Earth,’” which is another name for the Jerusalem Cricket. That statement has an endnote that says, “Son (anonymity requested) of Dr. Foster’s housekeeper (anonymity requested), personal interview, 1992.”

That endnote tells us nothing and seems to reference a tale told later in that chapter of the book. It is clear from my interviews with Frankie Rowe that it was her father, Dan Dwyer, who made reference to the Child of the Earth. The

Frankie Rowe

description of seeing the two dead aliens and the single survivor is also from Frankie Rowe.

Lee Reeves, according to the information that I have, died in 1971 and therefore is not an original source for this information. He had been a laborer at the Malco Refinery in 1947, but he was also a member of the Roswell Police Department and had worked as a fireman at the Orchard Park prisoner of war camp south of Roswell and for the city of Roswell Fire Department at some time, so he did have a connection there.

The trouble arises when the testimony of J. C. Smith, a firefighter in Roswell in 1947 is recalled. He was first interviewed by Karl Pflock and Smith made it clear in that interview that the Roswell Fire Department had not made a run out to the crash site, even in a piece of make-shift firefighting equipment.

Later when Tony Bragalia and I interviewed Smith separately, he made it absolutely clear that the fire department had not gone to the crash site. When I asked Smith if he had known Dan Dwyer, he said that he had and that Dwyer had gone out in his personal car. Smith told me that an Army colonel had come into the fire station and told them that they didn’t have to worry about the crash. They, the Army, would take care of it.

Dwyer, however, drove on out on his own, according to Smith, and not in one of the fire station’s vehicles and not with someone else. There was no discussion of Reeves at all until his story surfaced sometime in the last decade or so and was apparently relayed by his son, though there is nothing in the Carey and the Schmitt book to tell us that. It is my deduction given the information available.

Where does that leave us? Well, with the Dan Dwyer story, we learn from family members that he did go out there and said that he did see the bodies. We learn from J. C. Smith that Dwyer did go out there, but in his own car. We learn from the fire department records that there is nothing to suggest that any of the fire station’s equipment was dispatched on a run outside the city limits in the time frame necessary to corroborate the Reeves’ part of the story. Given the nature of the log, had some of their equipment been dispatched, there was no reason not to mention it. And we see that the Reeves’ tale is contradicted by the first-hand testimony of J. C. Smith.

It is my guess that the Reeves’ tale was told by one of the Reeves children or grandchildren, most likely Lewis Lee Reeves. When confronted with this sort of problem, the best case scenario is to rely on the first-hand testimony, which is Smith and which was told some sixty years after the event (which doesn’t make it true, only that it is of a better quality). The second-hand testimony is not properly sourced, is clearly not from a first-hand source, and is in conflict with other information and documentation. It now falls into the category of a “friend of a friend” tale and we all know how that works out… (and to prevent someone from stating the obvious here, I realize that it is technically the son of the man, but then, given the way the information is published, we really don’t know that either.)

The Roswell Slides ARE NOT the Roswell Slides

So now we’re told that the Roswell Slides might not be linked to Roswell and that the name, Roswell Slides was invented by the debunkers and is not a term used by anyone on the inside. For the latest interviews with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, see The Conspiracy Show hosted by Richard Syrett which can be found here:

https://youtu.be/fQyAVrFnTos?t=1h3m59s

The segment with Carey and Schmitt starts at the 1:04:20 mark of the show and they are on for about thirty minutes. You’ll just have to fast forward through the first hour to get to the Carey and Schmitt interview.

Here’s what we learn by listening to this. According to Tom Carey, the couple who took the slides was well connected to the Eisenhowers. The wife was a “high-powered lawyer in Midland, Texas and the husband was an oil field geologist.” Part of his territory was New Mexico. Please note that Carey is suggesting that the Rays, whose name he does not use, were the ones who took the photographs though all that can be said is that they may have owned the slides at one time decades ago. The provenance of the slides is still very shaky.

Carey then went on to explain how the slides were originally discovered. He said:

Current owner came into possession of the slides around 1990. The husband [Bernerd Ray] died in 1982 and the lawyer wife [Hilda Ray] died in 1988 [though not mentioned, it seems that they had divorced at some point]. During a clean out of their house, in their garage, one of the people who was part of the cleanup crew discovered this huge box of color slides, Kodachrome slides, and she said, “Oh, these look interesting,” so she kept them. She took them home instead of taking them to the dumpster. She took them for herself because nobody wanted them… so she kept them and didn’t look at them for a number of years [which seems strange after she had determined they were interesting, but never mind]. She finally looked at them and these two slides… were separate from all the others. There were over 400 slides in total. But there were these two that were taped in an envelope to the underside of the lid to the box. So she looked at those and she got spooked… She shipped the whole box to her relative who has them now. He was no UFO guy but he looked at these two slides and he says, “I don’t know what this is…” he had heard about Roswell… So he looked at them and I better contact somebody who knows something about this.

Of course, in his position, my first thought would have been to search for someone who knew about the Roswell UFO case. Carey said that the man had gone to the Internet (which is something I bet we all do now a days) and looked for something about Roswell. Carey’s name came up and the man set an email.

During the interview, Schmitt suggested that the “debunkers” had labeled them the Roswell Slides and they had not made that connection meaning that the slides were connected to Roswell. Syrett, in recapping some of this said that Carey and Schmitt weren’t linking these images to Roswell but there was a possibility that there was a connection (or in the words of nearly everyone else, let’s beat around the bush some more).

All though the interview, however, Carey talked as if it was an already established fact that the slides were from the Roswell case. Continuing in that vein, Schmitt said, “The dating of the slides is from 1947 to 1949. As we will be demonstrating at the event in May, there were specific areas that the photographers visited… both worked in west Texas and New Mexico… the circle of friends were closely linked to Eisenhower.” Or, in other words, this is connected to Roswell even though these people lived in Midland, Texas and had pictures of Eisenhower in his uniform.

The link to Eisenhower seems to be based on the fact that some of the slides in the box of 400 were of Eisenhower, which doesn’t link them to him personally other than they were in the same place at the same time… Just as I was in the same place as David Letterman and I even have a picture of me standing next to him, but we are not closely linked.

During the interview, Carey was asked about what linked the eyewitness testimony to other alien bodies. He said:

[The] woman standing by a glass slab… the body lying on it appears to be 3½ to 4 feet tall… large inverted pear-shaped head but there is one item on it, on top of the head that was described by one of the first-hand witnesses, one of the first ones to the crash site… the local fireman named Dan Dwyer who described when he got home that night and he told his family about it… they asked him, “What did it look like?” Instead of giving a detailed description he just said, “Child of the Earth.” [Which is an insect also known as the Jerusalem cricket]… It’s something on the head, I don’t want to give anything away here… there is something on the top of the head that one of the eyewitnesses described and it’s on this particular creature on the slide… That’s why Dan Dwyer called it the Child of the Earth.

But what Carey doesn’t say here, and which is extremely important is that Dwyer was never interviewed by any of the UFO researchers and calling him a first-hand witness without explaining the circumstances is misleading. Dwyer died before the interest in Roswell was renewed. Contrary to the impression that this is first-hand testimony, it was relayed by Frankie Rowe, Dwyer’s daughter. While I believe that Rowe is telling us what she believes to be the absolute truth, it is second hand from her so anything deduced from the testimony is shaky at best.

Apropos of nothing, Carey did mention that this ranked as a “smoking gun,” slightly better than the “smoking gun” of the Ramey memo. Both, according to Carey, are extremely important bits of evidence and, of course, the Ramey memo is directly related to Roswell.

What have we learned here?

Well, the Roswell Slides don’t necessarily show a creature from the Roswell crash, at least according to Schmitt. But then both he and Carey talk as if it was already proven that the creature, whatever it was, is from the Roswell crash.

The slides were apparently in a vacant house for two years before they were found, and then the woman who found them and took them, didn’t look at them for a number of years. She was so freaked out by them that she sent all the slides to her brother…I mean a relative, who apparently did nothing with them for years. Then about three years ago this fellow, who lives in Chicago, looked at them and thought he had better find someone who knew something about Roswell. He emailed Carey.

We also learned that when they attempted to interest American scientists in the slides, no one would come forward. The news media was equally unimpressed, but foreign scientists have examined the slides and made comment about them. Two of them are Canadian anthropologists who were not named but whose analysis will be part of the Mexico City show. They will be named there. All this data and much more will be presented in Mexico City.

And, although they suggest that the slides aren’t linked to Roswell, when they begin to talk about them, it is clear that is exactly what they think. And if they don’t, then why bring poor old PFC Benavides into it so that he can say that the creature in the photograph looks like the bodies he saw in Roswell? While they might not like the name the Roswell Slides and don’t refer to them that way, it is what they believe. All we can hope for is that they’ll have some better evidence about the slides than they have mentioned in the various interviews so far. The story of how the slides ended up in the hands of UFO researchers doesn’t allow for evidence of who took the pictures in the first place or for an unbroken chain of custody. There are still too many loose ends. I do hope they can do better in Mexico City.

The Last of the Roswell Witnesses

Just the other day I saw or read something that suggested that the Roswell investigation has transitioned into a new phase with the recent and untimely death of Jesse Marcel, Jr. It was suggested that he was the last of the first-hand witnesses, having held the metallic debris and having heard about the find on the Brazel (Foster) ranch from his Army Air Forces intelligence officer father.

But I realized that this isn’t true. While I know that this will generate discussions that have little to do with the posting (I mean look how far afield some of the others have roamed), I would suggest that there are still some first-hand witnesses alive.

The first one who springs to mind first is Frankie Rowe. As a twelve-year-old girl during that July of 1947, she had the opportunity to handle a piece of metallic debris found by a state police officer. She also heard the story of the crash from her father who had driven out to the crash site on his own… which explains why there was no record of the Roswell Fire Department involvement. And please remember that this was confirmed by a member of the Fire Department in interviews conducted by both Tony Bragalia and me (and no, we really don’t have to go through all that again, this simply means that whatever you think of the tale, Frankie didn’t invent it, which also doesn’t mean it was grounded in reality… I’m just trying to prevent the round robin arguments that this can generate.)

I also think of Sally Tadolini, daughter of Marian Strickland, who handled a bit of material recovered by Bill Brazel. Brazel had brought it by and showed it to a number of people. Tadolini signed an affidavit about this, including a description of the debris that when fully read doesn’t suggest something of an earthly manufacture. And yes, I know that signing an affidavit doesn’t make it true, but it does provide us with a concise description of the event. There really should be little dispute about this. There is no indication that Tadolini is not telling the truth… the dispute is about the origin of the material that she saw.

Both of these women were shown bits of metallic debris and both are still living. True, they didn’t see anything quite as dramatic as that suggested by Jesse Marcel, but they did see something that was different enough and exciting enough that they remember the event. We can argue about the reliability of now more than sixty-year-old memories later.

I will note that in the last year or so Tony, Tom Carey and I have talked with a number of the men who were stationed at Roswell in 1947 and who were lower ranking which, in many cases simply meant younger. One of them, who was 87 when I talked to him told me that everything was, “Hush hush. They told us to keep our mouths shut.”

He also said, “Everything was highly classified.”

Which, of course, could mean many things and he provided no new information. We were talking about the crash and the like, so I can say with some confidence that his comments were related to that. But learning only that something was highly classified, especially at the only atomic strike force in the world at the time, doesn’t move us any closer to learning what happened.

Other interviews have contained the same sort of information. We can conclude that something happened and the soldiers were warned about talking too freely. Others said they remembered nothing or heard nothing and weren’t involved.

The point is simply that with the loss of Jesse Marcel, we see the end of the road. The numbers of witnesses to the events are slipping away and we are left with the descendants who heard the stories from those first-hand witnesses. We haven’t reached the end of that road yet, but time is not on our side. I just wanted to correct that statement that we have no one left. 

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.

Citizen Hearing and Merrill Cook

When I read that former Congressman Merrill Cook from Utah, one of those at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, had said, “I do not believe there has been any strong, credible evidence of [alien visits] at this point but I do think there has been some credible evidence of things that are unidentified that had been flying about,” I was disappointed. But then I thought about what he had said and realized that it was quite fair.

 

Merrill Cook

Cook, who asked some very convoluted questions, hadn’t dismissed the idea of alien visitation but had suggested that the strong evidence hadn’t been presented. Of course that was correct. Had there been that sort of physical evidence, then the conversation would have ended at that point and we could move onto the next phase.

 

There were some very persuasive documents presented. In one case from South America, a pilot, Comandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas (Ret) of the Peruvian Air Force, who had fired on a UFO described the event. He had two pages of an official message about it. It said that he had fired on the UFO without results and I realized that could have meant he missed, so I asked.

 

Using a 30 mm cannon on his SU-22, he had hit the object when he shot at it. The rounds had no effect, and the object seemed to “absorb” the ammunition. Make no mistake, a 30 mm round is huge and explosive.

While I was on the “hot seat” along with Don Schmitt and Stan Friedman, Cook asked if anyone in 1947 had seen the alien bodies, but it wasn’t clear if he wanted to know if someone had discussed it in 1947 or if he wanted to know if someone there in 1947 had seen them. Each time we tried to offer an answer, he seemed to change the question by adding qualifications or modifications to it.

 

The answer was, of course, that none of us were around in 1947 (other than Stan) to gather evidence. However, Dan Dwyer had told family members in 1947 that he had seen the bodies, describing them as small humanoids.

This is the Frankie Rowe tale. She said that her father came home after seeing the crash site and told them of the little men he had seen. Later, Rowe’s sister, Helen Cahill said that sometime around 1960, she asked her father about the story and he told it to her. Does that make Rowe’s report true? No, just answers the question that we do have some testimony for that.

There was also Beverly Bean whose father, Melvin Brown, told her during the first moon landing that the UFOs were real and he had seen the bodies. There is another version of this that suggests he told her sometime later, but the point is that he was apparently saying these things prior to the publication of the Roswell information (and yes, both her sister and her mother have confirmed that Brown said these things, which, again, doesn’t make them true, only that he said them several times over the years).

I mentioned Edwin Easley and what he had said to family members, but, of course, this all came about in the early 1990s.

So, we had the names of people who seemed to have passed word of the bodies in 1947, and the names of people who had been there, in Roswell in 1947, who mentioned bodies to family members at some point after that. We had the answer to the question. We just didn’t articulate it well.

Cook at the Citizen Hearing

We did a poor job of answering the question for Cook and that is our fault. And before I get comments telling me that the testimony is in dispute, that we’re dealing with memories that are now decades old, and that we have some tales that have been disproved, I know all that. The question might have been had any of these people talked about bodies in 1947, and the evidence says that they did… but the proof is not there.

And he had a tendency to cut off an answer and ask another question, or maybe the same question a different way, which added to the confusion. He asked some convoluted question about the American Academy of Sciences and their endorsement of the Condon Committee report. I should have said that they had not engaged in a proper peer review because if they had, they would have noticed that 30% of the cases were unexplained. Worse, if possible, one was explained as a natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since but didn’t identify what that might be.

The real point is that we can prove the cover-up with documentation that has been declassified and documents that are clearly false. How else to explain the Air Force response to Senator Jeff Bingaman when he asked about Project Moon Dust? He was told that such a project never existed. Well it did and continues under another name (and no, I don’t know that name).

So Cook wouldn’t say that we proved to him that we have been visited, but we proved enough that he thought there is credible evidence that something unidentified is flying around. That might be splitting a hair, but I understand what he was thinking when he said that. Besides, he agreed that something unidentified was flying around and that is more than enough.

Had we had more time, had we brought other documents, had we provided more sources for the information, we might have done even better. For now, this is enough. Something unidentified is flying around and shouldn’t we attempt to find out what it is?

Aztec, Karl Pflock and Scott Ramsey

In his book, The Aztec Incident, Scott Ramsey is quite annoyed with Karl Pflock over Karl’s claim that he’d seen a diary reportedly kept by Silas Newton, one of the original Aztec crash proponents. Karl’s report, in which he claims that Newton wrote that the Aztec crash was a hoax, seems to prove that there was no Aztec crash... but to be fair, can we trust that assessment?

Karl Pflock

A moment to recap, if necessary. Karl told me, as he peddled Roswell in Perspective, that editors at Prometheus had said that his book wasn’t skeptical enough. I would have thought the criterion would be for evidence to support the skepticism rather than skepticism for the sake of skepticism, but that is an argument for another time.

In the past I have noted two points where Karl printed his skeptical arguments that were flawed, but no one from that side of the fence questioned these claims. In one, he took Don Schmitt and me to task for suggesting that Corporal E. L. Pyles had seen an airborne object that might have been the thing that crashed. He said that Pyles could not remember the date, but a paragraph or so later, mentioned that Pyles noted that when he read the newspaper report about the flying saucer "capture" he thought that might have been what he had seen. In other words, Karl seemed to corroborate our claim that the incident took place in the first week of July, 1947. (Well, we put a precise date on it based on other information and I hope to get to the bottom of that during our investigation.)

The second was his dismissal of the Frankie Rowe story that her father had been to the crash site. Karl mentioned three firefighters he had interviewed, but when I interviewed one of them, the story was slightly altered. No, the stuff Karl published was accurate, it just wasn’t everything that the man knew about the situation. Karl, to give him the benefit of the doubt, cut his interview short after he had the information he wanted rather than all the information available.

I mention this because another story has developed and it has to do with one aspect of the Aztec crash, or rather one of the original and primary, though second-hand witnesses to the Aztec crash. Silas Newton was the original source for the story that Frank Scully published about the UFO crash at Aztec in his Behind the Flying Saucers.

According to what Karl wrote in Anomalist 8, Spring 2000, pages 137 to 161, he had learned from an unnamed source that Silas Newton had left, not really a diary, but a memoir of sorts, that talked about the Aztec crash. Karl said that after the Albuquerque Journal ran a story about the Aztec crash on May 17, 1998, he received a telephone call from a "source" who said he had a document written by Newton. Karl asked for a copy and was told, "Absolutely not," but that he could see it if he wanted to. On July 11, 1998, according to Karl, he met with the source for the first time.

Over about the next year, he met with the source and talked with him on the telephone a number of times. Although he got to see the document, he wasn’t allowed to photograph it or to have any other sort of photo copy. He was allowed to read it, take notes and even copy what he wanted in his own hand, but nothing more. He just wasn’t allowed do anything that would prove the document existed.

Karl did say that he didn’t know what Newton’s handwriting looked like, but was able to obtain, through William Moore, a holographic copy of Newton’s will, which is, of course, a handwritten copy. To his admittedly untrained eye, the writing on both documents looked the same. So, for Karl, this was a sort of corroboration.

The main point here is that, according to Karl in what he copied from the Newton diary, "The Aztec saucer tale, including all of the associated landing claims was a hoax. Newton invented the tale to give his "doodlebug" [which is a device that allegedly find oil or other minerals with a machine] pitch – in his words – ... a big secret feel."

Karl also wrote, "Now we come to what, if true, may be a significant new development in this wild affair. After the Denver Post revealed he was Scientist X, [which refers to a lecture at the University of Denver in 1950 where Newton laid out the Aztec crash tale as well as other flying saucer information] Newton received two visitors at his Newton Oil Company office in Denver. These men claimed to be with a highly secret U.S. government entity, which they refused to name. Newton writes [again according to Karl] ‘They grilled me, tried to poke holes in my story. Had no trouble doing it and laughed in my face about the scientific mistakes I made. They never said so, but I could tell they were trying to find out if I really knew anything about flying saucers.’

"Newton’s visitors told him they knew he was pulling a scam and then gave him what may have been the surprise of his life. ‘Those fellows said they wanted me to keep it up, keep telling the flying saucer story and the people they worked for would look out for me and for Leo...’"

What Karl had done, was not only expose Aztec as a hoax, but also hinted that there was a governmental agency in the background who wanted this hoax story to be repeated. They had something they were hiding, though Karl didn’t speculate about what that secret might be.

This is devastating information for those who accept the Aztec crash story as real. The man who claimed responsibility, Newton, had written down that he made up the story to lend credibility to his "doodlebug" and that the government knew it. They just didn’t care.

Scott Ramsey, however, suggests in his book, The Aztec Incident, that he quizzed Karl on these points and others sometime later, in 2002, during one of the Aztec UFO conventions. According to Scott, he asked if Karl had compared any known samples of Newton’s handwriting to the diary. Karl told him, "...he could not find any comparisons to do such a thing. Karl could see that I was becoming amused at how he ignored his former Intelligence training in allowing such unsupported or unverified statements, so he backed down to telling me that the source was Silas Newton’s nephew..."

Scott wrote, "My conclusion remains that no diary exists and the false Newton story was either fabricated or Karl himself was the victim of a hoax."

Karl did, according to what he published two years earlier, however, have samples of Newton’s handwriting, and it looked to be the same as the diary. In fact, according to what I was told, Karl had been able to locate several samples of Newtons’ handwriting.

But Scott is right about one thing. If a proponent of a crashed saucer story came out with this sort of unsupported information, we would all be right in suspecting it. Without the diary, without the name of the source, without some sort of independent corroboration, we would reject it out of hand... knowing that it is up to those telling the story to prove it true.

Given some of the things that have appeared in the past such as Karl’s claim that Corporal Pyles couldn’t remember the month of his "sighting" ,but then saying a paragraph later that after he saw the story in the Roswell Daily Record if what he saw was tied to the UFO crash, and his partial interview with one of the Roswell firemen, you have to wonder about the value of his Aztec revelations. You have to wonder if Karl wasn’t a little too enthusiastic about the "Newton diary," which, of course, does not make the Aztec crash reality.

There is one other point, though I’m not sure of the relevance. Back in the 1970s, just as the cattle mutilation phenomenon was gaining some national attention, two fellows, Daniel Kagan and Ian Summers convinced a publisher to allow them to investigate the case. While in Colorado Springs, at the home of a private detective, they met a fellow who claimed his name was Kurt Peters... Kurt with a "K". They later identified that fellow as Karl Pflock. Karl himself admitted as much decades later in the pages of UFO when he tried to make light of the little deception, writing, "I was a Ufologist for the CIA...".

It was, of course, all tongue-in-cheek. It was meant to suggest that these stories of his spying on the UFO field for the CIA were nothing more than mere rumors that seemed to circulate throughout the UFO field. You know that you have made it when people begin to accuse you of working for the FBI, the CIA, AFOSI or a number of other agencies.

Karl explained "Kurt Peters" this way. "Erianne [the Colorado Springs private detective who was interested in cattle mutilations] needed a writer to collaborate on a book. I needed a money-maker, and this seemed just the ticket. I could have saved myself well-deserved embarrassment if I had not allowed my critical judgment to be shouldered aside by visions of fame and fortune."

Karl continued, "Not long after our book proposal began making the rounds of publishers, Erianne was contacted by Kagan and Summers, who said they were working on a book about the mutilations mystery. Rivals!... I suggested it might be useful for me to be at the meeting. However, there was a chance that Kagan and Summers might recognize me by name as a writer and put two and two together. Erianne suggested I use a pseudonym and say I was a researcher who sometimes helped him on cases. Thus the misbegotten ‘Kurt Peters’ was born."

Of course, this whole thing sounds somewhat bogus. Kagan and Summers wouldn’t care that Karl was working on a book about the mutilations because they had already sold theirs. And there really was very little chance that they would have recognized Karl’s name since he hadn’t published much, though he had worked as an editor at a small publisher at one time.

This little episode allows us a glimpse of some of Karl’s thought processes. In the end, it might mean nothing, other than he was attempting to protect his book project (which never saw the light of day) but then, it was a calculated deception.

While Karl’s tale of Newton’s diary is suspect, if for no other reason than Karl never revealed his source, he didn’t have a copy of the diary other than the notes he had taken, and no one else has seen the diary, it doesn’t mean that the Aztec crash is real. It only means that Karl’s revelations, while extraordinary if true, are simply unsubstantiated hearsay. There is no way to verify any of those revelations unless the source reveals the information to another.

The Aztec case remains with no real evidence to support its reality and a provenance that seems to return to Silas Newton, who told it to Frank Scully. Newton was charged with fraud and other crimes on several occasions dating as far back to 1928 and as recently as 1972, just prior to this death. As a witness, as a source, Newton leaves a great deal to be desired.

So, here’s where we are on this. I can’t give much weight to Karl’s claims of a Newton diary simply because none of the evidence has been seen by anyone other than Karl. If the situation were reversed, that is, a witness came forth with some documentation to prove Aztec real but the source was not revealed and the documentation was not revealed, we’d all be quick to condemn it. (Think of Virgil Riggs here... the former Air Force enlisted man who met with Donald Bass who said it was real, but no one has heard from Bass in decades.)

That is the situation we have here. Nothing to support Karl’s claims, and so, until we see more evidence, until the source talks to someone else, the tales of Newton’s diary are simply unsubstantiated hearsay and that’s really all they are.

Roswell Firemen and the Double Standard

The double standard in UFO research is alive and well in Roswell. Tony Bragalia reports on what he and I learned from talking with one of the Roswell Firemen, and the first skeptical comment is that we can’t trust the memories of the old. The man shared with us his recollections of what happened in 1947 but he’s old (and fairly crotchety) so we can ignore this. His memories are all jumbled together, confused, confabulated, incoherent, and not based in reality.

First, let’s examine exactly what he told to Tony and what he told to me. He said that there had been no run out to the UFO crash site by the Roswell Fire Department. He didn’t say they didn’t make runs outside the city limits because we know that isn’t true. He said that there had been no run by the fire department for this specific event. Not that crash didn’t happen, but that they made no fire run.

Why not? A colonel from the base (though I suspect it might have been an officer of a lower grade simply because there weren’t that many colonels in Roswell, though the Roswell Fire Marshal was a lieutenant colonel) came out and ordered them not to go. Later the City Manager did the same thing by ordering the firemen not to discuss the events.

It also seems that the men of the Roswell Army Air Field fire department did respond to the crash. It was this fire department that went out to the site, and not the civilians.

When I spoke the to man, he was reluctant to talk, and if I approached a question from a slightly different angle he would tell me that he had already answered that question. This told me that he was still sharp at age 90 and that his mind had not faded as some might suggest.

One point that I made in an earlier post was this man had been interviewed by Karl Pflock, and his testimony had been used to discredit Frankie Rowe. When I asked if he knew Dan Dwyer, Frankie Rowe’s father, he said that he had. He said that Dan was a fireman (removing, again, this skeptical claim that it had been proven that Frankie Rowe’s father was not a fireman... why do I think that someone tried to find a fireman in that frame with the last name Rowe, never thinking that Frankie Rowe had once been Frankie Dwyer and when she married took her husband’s name?)

It was at this point the man told me, as he had Tony, that the colonel had come into the department to order them not to go, but that Frankie’s father, in his personal car (or POV for those of you with a military mind set) drove to the site. He said that Dan had told him the site was cordoned by armed guards, but that Dwyer had gotten close enough to see the craft. In other words, corroboration for Frankie Rowe.

Second, let’s talk about this double standard. We are told to be careful of information obtained from the very old. We are told of diseases of the mind that cause confusion in the elderly. We are told how they jumble their memories together and that we can ignore what they say, especially if it concerns the crash of an alien spacecraft.

On the other hand, these same skeptics have no trouble accepting the memories of the old if those memories conform to what they believe. Take Charles Moore, for example (and I don’t mean to pick on him, but the best example includes him). Moore is believed when he talks of the mythical Mogul Flight No. 4. We all know it happened because Moore told us he remembered losing track of the balloons up around Arabella and he was intrigued by the strange names of the places in New Mexico. So, contrary to the record that suggests Flight No. 4 was cancelled, and contrary to the information that the first successful flight in New Mexico was No. 5, we know there was a Flight No. 4 because Moore remembered losing track of it near Arabella.

So, why are these fifty and sixty-year-old memories of Moore accepted and those of the fireman rejected? How is it that Moore’s memory remained intact and that of the fireman has been jumbled by age and the publicity surrounding the Roswell crash? Why do we accept Moore’s claim of losing track of a flight near Arabella that we can’t establish took place but reject the information that corroborates the testimony of other witnesses?

Here’s the real point, however. Both Tony and I have interviewed a man who was in the Roswell Fire Department in July 1947. He said that they were told by a military representative told them not to go out there. He said that he was told the base fire department would handle it. He said that he learned, from Dwyer, that the craft was strange... suggesting that it was an unknown object from someplace else.

He has corroborated much of what Frankie Rowe said which means we can dispense with calling her a liar. She might be mistaken, she might be wrong, but she’s not a liar. Others are saying the same things she said so that her story is no longer stand alone (though her sister had corroborated part of it long ago). She has been vindicated.

Where do we go now? Well, I have the names of some of those who served in the base fire department and the search for them will begin. Of course, I realize that we are now more than sixty years from the event and the men who served in various capacities on the base would likely be in their late 80s and into their 90s, but we might get lucky. And we know of a couple of other places to begin searching for information. We now just have to take that step.

PS to Korff

I really had planned to add this to the last post about Korff because I wanted to avoid a public flame war. It serves no useful purpose but I kept finding things that needed to be pointed out. I mean, we could engage in the allegations all we wanted but without some sort of proof from one side or the other it boiled down to "he said... he said." I thought that maybe a little longer post might induce Korff to provide some evidence rather than continue to sling allegations and make threats.

Korff loves to accuse others of putting words in his mouth. He writes, "In a recent posting on his [meaning mine] blog [which he has now figured out is not part of Paul Kimball’s blog which, in his bellicose world would make it a LIE], Kevin Randle makes the false claim that Kal Korff ‘now suddenly describes’ the Israeli based Special Secret Services as a ‘meta-organization.’"

Well, here is what I actually wrote, "Kal Korff claims to be a captain in an Israeli organization that he now describes as a "‘meta-organization’..."

So, I didn’t say "suddenly".

Trivial point?

Certainly.

But, who is putting words in whose mouth?

Korff then writes, "By comparison, I was never stupid enough, literally, to fall for the LIES of Frank Kaufmann, Glen (whose name he misspells) Dennis, Frankie Rowe, Jim Ragsdale, Trudy Truelove, etc. — ALL of which Randle not only "fell for" but even force fit and fudged and hyped "evidence" to fit."

Here’s the problem with this. Frankie Rowe wasn’t lying and Trudy Truelove, according to Ragsdale was killed in a car wreck, so what story did she produce? Why smear her name when it was provided by Ragsdale and she said nothing? Ragsdale said that he was with her on the night he saw the crash. And since she never talked about this, should we now characterize Korff’s mistake as a LIE?

Korff then complains, "Finally, what Kevin Randle does NOT tell you is something he ALREADY KNOWS: The name "Special Secret Services" is a ROUGH TRANSLATION from the orignal (sic) Hebrew.

"KEVIN RANDLE DOES NOT SPEAK HEBREW. HE DOES NOT KNOW THE NAME OF S3 IN HEBREW. THEREFORE HE WILL NEVER FIND ANY INFO ABOUT IT WITHOUT KNOWING THE HEBREW NAME — DUH!"

But isn’t that what I said up front in the blog? I wrote, "He [Korff] says that you can’t 'Google' it because the English version of the name isn’t quite accurate and you need the Hebrew name". So, why not supply that as some have requested? You can decide for yourself if Korff’s criticism is valid. And notice that Korff still hasn’t supplied the Hebrew name for us so that we can independently verify the existence of this organization. Remember, it is up to him to prove this "meta-organization" exists and not up to us to disprove it.

In another post, he wrote, "For the record, I sent Kevin Randle only a few emails, and the last one was simply a friendly warning letting Randle know that he had upset other people with his false, liberlous (sic) and slanderous remarks and that I was giving him some friendly advice to try and spare him some pain from some parties who would not tolerate this."

We see here that his warnings weren’t very friendly and that there were a few of them.

He then makes the claim that if anyone else had made about him he would say that it is a LIE. He wrote, "But wait, folks, it gets worse for Randle. A real scandal in fact. Not only has he lied about me ‘bombarding’ him, but what Randle does NOT tell you is that he (Randle) DELETED the emails he claims he was ‘bombarded’ with!"

He adds, "In other words, Randle didn’t bother reading them. But yet he ‘comments’ on them, as if he alone was the final word and the right word."

Of course he doesn’t know if I read them or not, only that I deleted them when I was through with them. So, Korff, in a not very clever attempt to smear me has jumped to another false conclusion which, if I had said it about him, he would call a LIE. If he suggests otherwise, then I suppose I will have to post the contents of some of this so everyone will know the truth.

Korff reports about CPT Lorenzo Kent Kimball, who was the medical supply officer at Roswell in July 1947 and whose office was on the perimeter of the hospital complex (See my column published in December 2006 about Kimball, in which Paul Kimball and I discuss this), "After I (meaning CPT Kimball) learned of these assertions, I called Doctor Jack Comstock, who, as a Major, was the Hospital Commander in 1947, and in 1995 was living in retirement in Boulder, Colorado. I asked him if he recalled any such events occurring in July of 1947 and he said absolutely not. When I told him that Jesse B. was supposed to have conducted a preliminary autopsy on alien bodies, he had a hard time stopping laughing - his response was: PREPOSTEROUS!!"

What Korff has failed to report is that Jack Comstock was NOT the hospital commander in July 1947. He was just one of the doctors. In 1947, the hospital commander was Lieutenant Colonel Harold Warne. So Korff printed the inaccurate information without bothering to check it. If it was somehow negative, it must be true.

But look at it from another point of view. I asked some tough questions that weren’t answered. I showed some pictures to underscore the validity of those questions. And all Kal Korff can do is respond by saying that he has always called the Special Secret Services a "meta-organization" and add the word suddenly to my statement, then invent criticisms about what he thinks I said, makes more claims about witnesses he doesn’t believe and doesn’t know, and finally suggest that I don’t speak Hebrew, written in all caps as if this is some kind of important revelation. And he still dodges the questions...

So, decide for yourself who is being reasonable and who is not. Read what he has to say with all his hyperbole and what I have to say, and decide for yourself.

I now try to bow out of this once again.

Frankie Rowe and the Roswell Crash

Poor Frankie Rowe (seen below) is having her name dragged through the mud by the anti-Roswell crash proponents again. Rowe is a nice lady who told me about her connection to the Roswell case in the early 1990s. She said that her father, a fire fighter with the Roswell Fire Department had made a run outside the city limits where they found the crash remains of the alien craft, and according to Rowe, a living alien creature.She also said that she had handled debris from the craft. Skeptics have dismissed her testimony saying that it has been discredited, but the truth is, she has not been discredited. Saying, repeatedly, doesn’t make it so.

As just a single example, some have said that her tale of the Roswell Fire Department response to the crash is untrue because the site of the wreck is outside of Roswell and the fire department didn’t make runs outside the city limits. This came from a former city council member who was not on the council in 1947.

Karl Pflock, supporting this idea, wrote, "As part of my investigation of Rowe’s story, I interviewed three retired members of the Roswell Fire Department who served with Rowe’s father at the time of the incident. I also discussed the matter with a former member of the Roswell City Council who served on the council committee responsible for pubic safety policies. None of the former firefighters remembered the department making such a run. Moreover, they and the former councilman said it was standing department policy not to respond to calls outside the city limits, even if they were close in..."

To check this out, I went to the Roswell Fire Department and asked them about runs outside the city. One of the fire fighters asked what they were supposed to do. Let it burn? But what was true when I was there in 1992 might not have been true in 1947, so I looked at the log books that go back into the 1920s. The truth is the Fire Department did make runs outside the city as the fire logs show so it is not outside the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, there is no log for this particular run, which, of course, means one of two things. Either it didn’t happen, or they were told not to log it because of the secrecy of the event. Logically, we all should opt for number one here, but that is not to say that number two doesn’t make equal sense.

Pflock does acknowledge this, that I found, in the logs for June 1947, a run outside the city limits, which, of course, negates what the councilman said (Rowe's father, Dan Dwyer, is on the left, leaning against the car). I’ll also note here that Pflock identified the councilman as Max Littell, who was not on the council in 1947, and that Littell attempted to relate everything in the Roswell case to things that he could control and use to make a profit. In other words, this case has been tainted by so many claims and counterclaims that it is difficult, if not impossible to get at the truth.

And I might point out that because he talked to three men who were not involved in the run, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Sure, it would be nice if one of them had said that he had gone out there, but that none of the three said he did means only that those three did not. I might also point out that Pflock did cherry pick his data. We know that he believed Roswell was a Project Mogul balloon so anyone suggesting it happened is wrong and those who remember nothing about the fire run are, of course, telling the truth.

Rowe, who has granted several interviews to many different researchers and reporters, told her story in depth and on video tape to me in January 1993. She said that her father had come home after his shift at the fire station (which lasted about twenty-four hours) and had something important to say. He then told them, according to Rowe, that they had gone about thirty miles outside of Roswell and then a few miles back to the west. He said there had been some kind of a crash and that he had called it a spaceship or a flying saucer or something.

Then she said one of the most important things. According to her, "I remember him saying that some of them helped pick up some pieces of the wreckage. He said he saw two bodies in bags and one that was walking around."

She said, "...he said he was sure that there were bodies because the third one would go over to them... he talked about this third one would go back and forth between different parts of the wreckage and was walking around dazed. He didn’t say if anyone tried to talk to this person."

The creatures were, according to what Rowe remembered, about the size of a ten year old, meaning that they were smaller than a human adult. The color was like that of an insect called Child of the Earth (more commonly called the Jerusalem Cricket seen at the left) which is sort of copper color or maybe a sort of dark brown).

Rowe also saw a bit of metallic debris that a State Trooper claimed to have picked up in the field. Rowe said that she thought it was about a week later. She’d had some dental work done and had gone over to the fire house to wait so that her father could drive her home. The State Policeman was there and he walked up to a table and said to the firemen, "You guys aren’t going to believe what I’ve got." He pulled out his hand and had a piece of metal.

Rowe said, "I think I got to pick it up and crumple it one time. I can only remember doing it one time... It just didn’t feel like anything... it was kind of a pewter color... Everybody got out their knives or whatever and tried to cut and they tried to burn it."

Unfortunately, as has happened so often in this case, no researcher had a chance to talk with Rowe’s father. He died long before the investigation began. But I did have the opportunity to talk with her sister, Helen Cahill. She was married in 1947 and living in California at the time of the crash, but had heard some discussion about the events during a visit to New Mexico in 1960. Although her information wasn’t as complete as that of Rowe, it confirmed, for what it’s worth, that Rowe did not invent the tale of the crash. Of course, it does little to validate it, except to suggest that Rowe’s father was talking about a UFO crash long before the reports of the Roswell events came to light and at a time when few people thought of UFOs as being from other worlds. Other explanations seemed to make people happier.

There is one problem, with all this, however. According to Rowe, she’d had some oral surgery which had begun to bled, which was why she had been in Roswell in the middle of July 1947. That was why she had been at the fire house when the State Policeman had brought in the metallic debris. Although records are not complete, there are none to show that Rowe’s oral surgery was done in July 1947 or that there were later complications.

It now boils down to what you want to believe. Rowe’s tale, contrary to what Pflock suggested, is consistent with many of the other stories floated about Roswell. She has been consistent in what she said, though, originally, she left out many details. The addition of those details have caused some to believe that he story has been altered. It hasn’t. It became more robust.

The real problem is that we have been unable to find the documentation to corroborate what Rowe said. The fire records do not reflect a run outside of Roswell on the proper dates and her dental records do not reflect problems with oral surgery in July 1947. She could easily have been in the fire department waiting for a ride home for any number of reasons. She said that she, and the other children, if in Roswell for any number of reasons, often went to the fire house so that their father could give them a ride home.

Oh, and for those who wish to dismiss her testimony, it was Frankie Rowe who told me the records did not bare out what she said. She could have just kept quiet about it and we would not have known.

They suggest, also, that Rowe’s tale doesn’t fit into the overall Roswell picture, but if you allow for the vulgarities of memory and point of view, what she says in not all that far from the traditional story. She provides a glimpse into what it was like for those outside the military who might have had some contact with this extraordinary tale.

What it boils down to is this. For those who accept the Mogul balloon explanation for Roswell, Rowe must be lying (or badly mistaken) because there was no alien craft, no bodies, and no metallic debris with strange properties. Since there was no craft, her story has been discredited.

For those of us who realize that Mogul simply does not fit all the facts and not just those cherry-picked for convenience, Rowe’s tale could be the memories of the crash filtered first through her father’s descriptions of the events, and then filtered through time.

And contrary to what Pflock and others have suggested, members of her family I was able to interview, corroborated parts of it. Helen Cahill, for example (Rowe’s older sister) remembered her father talking about these events.

So believer Rowe or not, but do not reject her story for the reasons given by Pflock and others because they are not accurate. The Roswell Fire Department did make runs outside the city limits in 1947, Max Littell envisioned a huge Roswell UFO project with him in the center of it, and there is corroborative testimony for Rowe, but, unfortunately, no documentation.