Why I'm Beginning to Dislike the UFO Field - Part Four

I was going through old files with an eye to weeding out the nonsense, the useless, the outdated and the duplications. As I was doing that, I turned over a newsletter from December 1996 and on the back found a note that I hadn’t seen before. It explained that I hadn’t been invited to participate in the Roswell 1997 celebration because I had libeled someone. My first reaction was that is a strange barb to throw at me considering all the false allegations that had been tossed my way over the years, including some from those on the committee to invite the speakers to the celebration.

But, I got to thinking about this and wondered to what it could refer. Back in that era, 1997, I did a monthly column for the Roswell Daily Record about all things UFO. I was asked to provide the column and I received no pay for it. I just thought it was a good avenue to promote the UFO situation as I understood it and to expose some of the nonsense that lingered in the field.

At one point, in that time frame, I was in the newspaper office when one of the editors approached me saying that they couldn’t run the latest column. I had libeled Dr. Donald Menzel in it. I pointed out that I had libeled no one and what I had written about Menzel was true… an absolute defense in a case of libel.

He didn’t want to debate the point even when I said that I could offer the evidence. He didn’t care because he saw it as libel. I then said that you can’t libel the dead and that since Menzel was a public figure, the threshold for libel was much higher. He didn’t care about that either and I told him he was free to print the column or reject it but I hadn’t libeled Menzel or anyone else.

And then I wondered if this could refer to the stories told by Gerald Anderson, he of the Plains of San Agustin crash. He claimed as a small boy he had been on the crash site and told a wonderful story about it, giving us the name of the archaeologist who was there, Dr. Winfred Buskirk. We, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, located Buskirk so that we had the chance to interview him. Buskirk, of course, said that he hadn’t been on the Plains in July 1947 because he was in Arizona doing research for his Ph.D. thesis. When I talked to Buskirk, he said that he had been a teacher at the Albuquerque High School and according to the school records, Anderson had been in his archaeology class… We had now connected Buskirk and Anderson, not on the Plains of San Agustin in 1947 but in the Albuquerque High School about ten years later.

Anderson, of course, denied the connection and even produced a Xerox copy of his high school transcript to prove he hadn’t taken Buskirk’s class but the real point is that we had put them into the same school at the same time. When we asked for a copy of that alleged transcript to be sent directly to a disinterested third party for verification, Anderson absolutely refused. It was obvious to most of us that Anderson had modified the transcript to validate his claim and actually hadn’t been very clever about it.

So, I was telling people that Anderson had lied about his high school class and his high school association with Buskirk. It was obvious that he had forged this document (and I have other documents that he forged as well) and it was clear that his tale of seeing a crashed alien craft on the Plains was complete fabrication. I was calling him a liar in the hopes he would sue me for saying those things. In discovery, as part of the lawsuit process, I would be able to get an official high school transcript to prove that Anderson was in Buskirk’s class and Anderson knew that would happen.

While it could be claimed that I had, in fact, libeled those people, the truth was a little more complicated than that. As I mentioned, the truth is an absolute defense so that all I had to prove was that Anderson had lied, and I had the documentation to prove it. The real problem was somewhat deeper than that.

From the left, Don Schmitt, Walter Haut and Max
Littell. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Around that same time, I was in the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. Max Littell, one of the founding members along with Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, came flying out of a back-office yelling that I was only in this for the money and that I wrote science fiction (I wonder where he had heard that?).

Truth be told, in all the various presentations I had made in Roswell, I always returned the honorarium to the hosts, taking only my expenses, except for the last time. I don’t know of any other researcher who has done this, and at the time Littell was shouting at me, I had not only donated money to the museum, I had arranged for a set of UFO magazines to be donated to them, which, of course meant that I had paid for them… and I never received a thank you for any of that.

But Littell had a bee in his bonnet about something and continued to make false statements. I think it all relates to the Jim Ragsdale tale that Littell began to push around that time. Ragsdale claimed that he had seen the object fall, had seen the bodies of the alien creatures, and had witnessed the military retrieval operation. Littell and Ragsdale entered into some sort of financial arrangement with an eye to developing the land where this alleged UFO fell. The trouble was that the site Ragsdale originally pinpointed was not the site that he and Littell were pushing at the time. I was a thorn in that idea because I knew what Ragsdale had originally said and had a tape of that interview. Later, it became clear that the Ragsdale tale was just that, a tale, with no basis in reality but in 1997 the financial rewards for Littell and Ragsdale were great. They had collaborated on a booklet about the case. Littell’s assault seemed to have grown out of that.

The point here isn’t all the nastiness involved, not to mention the false allegations about money or the suggestion that somehow writing science fiction disqualified me from UFO research (an allegation that only seems to apply to me because I had never heard any other researcher who has written science fiction to be disqualified by that same allegation).

The real point here is that you must toe the party line. You are not allowed to suggest that something might not be as accurate as thought and you must never question a witness story. You are required to believe it, all aspects of it, no matter how strange or ridiculous it has become. Deviate from that and you are a “debunker” whose mission is to divert attention from the truth, a pawn of the CIA, probably on their payroll, and to undermine the true stories being told that suggest alien visitation. Never mind where the evidence points, you are required to embrace it all whether it is crop circles, cattle mutilations, abductions, contact with the space brethren or any of the other sub-genres that can be appended to the UFO field.

I’m not sure who planted the story that I libel people, but I have a very good idea who it was. It was just another attempt to destroy my credibility because I didn’t happen to agree with some of his beliefs about UFOs.

As I mentioned earlier, this all began when I found that note on the back of a newsletter. I just thought I would mention it in the off chance that we all might be able to reduce the animosity in the field even if we disagree with one another, but I have little hope of that happening, given some of the emails I have received in the last few days… oh, I don’t take them seriously… I do read them and save them because you just never know when something said by someone in those emails will become important in proving a point at a later date. 

The Roswell Report - Case Closed... Maybe Not

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

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

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

Jim Ragsdale. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Dennis

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

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

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

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

Roswell Update: Jay West and Lieutenant Colonel Duran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Size of the Debris Field

Since I posted the article that suggested that Bessie Brazel’s testimony might be in error and that it was contradicted by that given by so many others, we have been all over the board. Nearly everyone was selecting that data which tended to support their position and ignore everything else. So, I thought I would take some of those points and provide the data available about them. I realize that some of you are so far to one side or the other that any sort of compromise is impossible, but for those who are interested in all the information, I will try to publish a series of articles that look at some aspect of this case.

First, I’ll tackle the size of the debris field because it seems to range from a square mile down to an area about 200 feet in diameter. That’s quite a big difference, and I know that we’ll never reach a consensus, but heck; we might have a little fun and learn something by accident.

The testimonies given after 1978 which is when Jesse Marcel, Sr. was identified as having recovered pieces of a flying saucer provide some of the data. Marcel himself told Bill Moore (The Roswell Incident, p. 63) that it was “about three quarters of a mile long and a couple of hundred feet wide.”

Stan Friedman, in his book, Crash at Corona (p.10) wrote of Marcel’s description, “The area covered with wreckage was roughly three quarters of a mile long and several hundred yards wide.”

Moore also quotes Walt Whitmore, Jr. as giving a description. Whitmore hadn’t seen the field before the Army cleaned it up, according to his testimony at that time. Moore wrote (p. 89), “Several days later Whitmore, Jr., ventured out to the site and found a stretch of about 175 – 200 yards of pastureland uprooted in a sort of fan-like pattern with most of the damage at the narrowest part of the fan.”

Whitmore told Karl Pflock (p. 154), “The debris covered a fan- or roughly triangle-shaped area, which was about 10 or 12 feet wide at what I thought was the top end. From there it extended about 100 to 150 feet, widening out to about 150 feet at the base. This area was covered with many, many bits of material.”

Bill Brazel, who hadn’t seen the debris in the field except for the small pieces he said he had found, also talked of a gouge that ran through the pasture. He said that it was narrow at one end spread out toward the center and then narrowed again. Although he didn’t give us a length of the gouge, he eventually took us to what he thought of as the top of the gouge. Later, during the CUFOS archaeological dig there, we measured down from that point, about three quarters of a mile, placing little flags along the way.

Flags placed to show the gouge during the CUFOS
archaeological dig in the early 1990s.

Bud Payne, who was a judge in New Mexico, said that he had been out to the debris field but had been turned back by the military cordon. He did get close to it and this would be irrelevant, except he took me out to the location he thought was the debris field. When he stopped his vehicle and we got out, I nearly stepped on one of those little flags we had placed there. We have attempted to gather them all but had missed the last one. Payne took me to the same three quarter of a mile stretch of New Mexico desert and through this provided, to a degree, the size of the field.

And, of course, there is the testimony in the affidavit signed by Bessie Brazel. She said, “There was a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seems to me now to have about the size of a football field [or about an acre].”

The most widely quoted size of the field is that given by Marcel. It can be found in a number of books but as noted here, it is traceable to that interview supplied to Bill Moore.

We are told, of course, that these memories are decades old and might be unreliable. Studies of memory and how it works suggest that confabulation (as opposed to lying) can often fill in gaps in memory, that each time a memory is accessed it is subject to alteration, and sometimes the memories simply no longer exist, yet the witness (I can think of no other word that fits here because they were involved in 1947) as he or she concentrates begins to put together a story that seems plausible.

We do have quite a few newspaper stories that were written in 1947, literally within hours of some of the men walking the fields, so that their memories should be clear and accurate. I say this knowing full well that some of the information given to the reporters was less than accurate and some of it that was published had been misunderstood.

The Roswell Daily Record, for example, reported, “The rubber [from the debris] was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.”

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in a later edition of their “Disc-overy Near Roswell Identified as Weather Balloon by FWAAF Officer,” reported, “Brazell [sic], whose ranch is 30 miles from the nearest telephone and has no radio, knew nothing about flying discs when he found the broken remains of the weather device scattered over a square mile of his land.”

The Albuquerque Tribune, in a story attributed to Jason Kellahin on July 9 reported, “Scattered with the materials over an area about 200 yards across were pieces of gray rubber.”

What does this tell us about the size of the debris field? Not much, actually. Those who wish to believe it was small, have several sources they can quote. Cavitt, in his interview with Colonel Richard Weaver didn’t provide a very vivid account of the size. He said that it was about twenty feet, but the statements were somewhat confusing. He might have been describing what he suspected was the size of the object or he might have been describing the distribution of the debris. He told Weaver, “Some here, some here, some here. No concentration of it. No marks on the ground, dug up, anything hidden or anything like that, just out on the territory around the bottom of New Mexico…” 

I don’t believe Whitmore’s testimony on this is reliable but suspect there was some collusion between Max Littell of the Roswell museum and Whitmore to come up with some debris, no matter what it was. They talked about creating a display in Roswell, but I don’t believe that Littell had thought that through. If Whitmore’s debris were pieces of a balloon, as he suggested to Pflock, then the mystique of the Roswell case eroded at that point and not many people would drive out of the way to look at a museum dedicated to a weather balloon.

Whitmore had told Moore that the site had been cleaned before he got there but contradicted that when he told Pflock that he saw the debris and even claimed to have some of it. The debris had been locked in his safe deposit box, but when the box grew too full, he moved the debris to his “junk room.” Although searches were made, nothing was ever found. It was just one more bit of debris that vanished.

There is Jesse Marcel’s testimony about the size of the field which he gave after 1978, but there is one story that provides some corroboration which was published in 1947. In Linda Corley’s book, Marcel said, “It was about a mile long and several hundred feet wide of debris.”

Brazel, according to one newspaper account agreed with that size, saying it was scattered over a square mile of the land. This was in a story other than the one written by J. Bond Johnson.

Returning to the Roswell Daily Record, Brazel, it seems, was saying that the debris field was about 200 yards in diameter and the Albuquerque Tribune changed the wording to 200 yards across which is not quite the same thing but is close. The by-line on the Albuquerque Tribune story, as noted, was by Kellahin, so he was apparently working from his notes made in Roswell.

All this means is that if you are a skeptic, you have some evidence that the size of the debris field was relatively small. If you are a believer, you have some evidence that the debris field is relatively large. You have the majority of the testimonies suggesting a large field from the record after 1978 but Bessie Brazel suggests it was about 100 yards by 50 yards, or about the size of a football field.

Or, in other words, this is a wash. Whatever side you come down on, there is testimony to support it. Not exactly a profound finding but just an observation that suggests there are facts for everyone to cherry pick.

Glenn Dennis Has Died

According to Albuquerque television station KOB-TV, Glenn Dennis died on Tuesday, April 28, 2015. He was the last of the three founding members of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico.

Dennis told researchers in 1989 that while he worked at Ballard’s Funeral Home in Roswell, he was called by an officer at the base who asked if they had any small, children-sized caskets. Later he said he was at the base while the recovery of the alien craft and the bodies of those killed had been brought in. In the back of an ambulance, he saw some strange metallic debris.

He told several researchers that he was friends with a nurse who told him about the alien bodies and the preliminary autopsy that had been preformed there. In later years his story would be challenged but he did not waver from the details.

In the early 1990s, with Walter Haut and Max Littell, a real estate salesman, they formed the museum. Dennis could often be found there and would sit down to tell his story to those who asked.

In the last few years Dennis’ health had deteriorated and he spent less time at the museum. He had been very ill for some time and died this week.

Max Littell and the Roswell Nuns

I suppose this could be called another of my “Chasing Footnotes” posts, but that isn’t quite right. Many will remember that Lance Moody was annoyed with me for the Catholic Nuns story as outlined in The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. I won’t dwell on that and those who wish to read about it can use the search engines supplied or look at:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-nuns-story-roswell-edition.html

What brings this up is that I found another reference to the nuns in a publication that I had no hand in. According to that booklet called, The Jim Ragsdale Story:

Mother Superior Mary Bernadette and Sister Capistrano reported seeing a bright object plunging toward the ground late in the evening of July 4, 1947. The two Sisters were on duty at St. Mary’s Hospital, located on South Main Street in Roswell, New Mexico. Many points of concurrence do fit the reports of others, especially Jim Ragsdale’s eye witness account of a UFO crash, during this rather short time frame. Be assured that the nuns told it exactly like it was on that 4^th of July night in 1947.

The author, who is unidentified in the booklet but is probably Max Littell, then, wrote, “Let us do some speculating together with established facts and figures.”

He suggested that some might believe the nuns could have been watching fireworks set off by Roswell residents celebrating the nation’s birthday. But he also wrote that the nuns would have known the difference between the fireworks and the bright object they saw. He uses the location of the hospital as a way of suggesting that the nuns were looking toward the west and would have been able to see the object fall near Boy Scout Mountain some fifty miles away where Ragsdale, in later years, claimed he was camping. This was some of the new corroboration for the Ragsdale tale, according to Littell.

While I could suggest this is also independent corroboration of the nun’s story, I don’t actually know that it is. Littell worked very hard to remove all trace of Don Schmitt and me from the Ragsdale tale and I have no doubt this extended to his coverage of the nun’s story.

In a chapter called “Max Littell Meets Jim Ragsdale,” he wrote, “In 1993, shortly after opening the Museum, we did have an investigator/author visiting us, and when his partner took the car on another errand, he needed a ride to his motel. I offered, and the individual said, ‘Great, but I need to go by and see a party on the way… This party turned out to be Jim Ragsdale.”

So, let’s put this in a different perspective. The investigator/author was Don Schmitt and, of course, the partner was me. I had to go out to interview a witness west of town, who, it turned out, had nothing to add to the Roswell case. Don, with Littell and Mark Chesney, drove over to see Ragsdale.

In the same vein, Littell wrote after Don had completed the interview, “Getting out of the car, the writer said…” Once again, Littell has referred to the person as the writer, but it was still Don Schmitt. In fact he never identifies either Don or me as those involved in this first telling of the Ragsdale tale or that we were the ones who found him in the first place.

Littell then wrote, “The investigator had apparently recorded the interview, or had taken enough notes [the interview was recorded so that it can be verified that Ragsdale changed his tale] that he could prepare a statement from Ragsdale. He asked if I could get the statement signed and notarized. Since I have been a notary for fifty years, I said that this could be easily accomplished.”

And here’s where the tale again slips off the rails. Littell wrote, “Within a few days, the instrument [affidavit] arrived, and I met Ragsdale for the first time. The instrument was read to him, he signed it, and I mailed it back to the investigator. Notaries do not make copies of the instrument, so I do not remember any of the statements made.”

Well, the interview took place on January 26 and the statement was signed on January 27, not a few days later. In an unsigned note on the letterhead of the International UFO Museum and Research Center, Littell wrote, “Kevin: Three Notarized copies exist. This one [sent to me], One left with the Ragsdales and one in our file…”

Or, in other words, Littell did make copies for us and sent them to us, but kept one for their files at the Museum. Therefore, Littell knew exactly what it said and it did not agree with the longer one he obtained in 1995.

What all this tells us that we can’t trust Littell’s version of these events and that he was working hard to remove from the record any mention of Don’s January 26 interview and my April 24, 1993 interview. Copies of the interviews were supplied to the Museum. If those were mentioned, then questions would be raised about the validity of Ragsdale’s later version of events and the new affidavit because it would be clear that Ragsdale had significantly changed his story and that we had quoted him accurately in our reporting of the first version.

This was all a long-winded way to suggest that I believe the information about the nuns was lifted from The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. It seems from the way it was worded that Littell had interviewed the nuns or someone associated with them, but there is nothing there that Don and I didn’t already know. Littell is dead and Ragsdale is dead so I can’t ask where the information originated. It is possible that Littell talked to one of the nuns who was still in Roswell, the one that Bill English told us about and Sister Day told us about, but I simply don’t know. If Littell did, the criticism is the same because he used the same source we did, no one has been able to locate the alleged diary entries after years of trying and there is no other corroboration for the tale.

While the information in Littell’s booklet about Ragsdale could be seen as confirmation of the nun’s story, I simply can’t tell if it was newer and better information or if he simply used the material that Don and I had gathered and shared with him. This is a dead end and it is in no way corroboration for the nun’s story.

Jim Ragsdale's Roswell Tale

Periodically questions are asked about certain witnesses and certain testimony because it seems there are several versions of that testimony out there. Sometimes it is the researcher who hears things wrong or gets something wrong but more often it is the alleged witness who has radically altered his or her tale. Some alteration is expected because no one actually tells a story the same way twice unless it has been memorized as opposed to having been lived. Major alteration is an indication that the story is probably not being accurately reported by the witness and the fault lies at the feet of the witness rather than with those reporting it.

Ah, the value of audio tape.

Brian Bell, apparently annoyed that I have suggested in the past that some of the witness testimony was unreliable, asked, “Ragsdale and Truelove testimony - He said they were in a car - you changed their story to say they were in a WW2 jeep and also changed it into a ‘wild night with lightning and thunder; a 30 to 40 mile an hour wind driving dust and dirt.’ You changed the facts and the details of a witness's testimony.”

Well, I would have ignored this because at the time I was working on another project and didn’t want to delve into this. But, coincidently, that project required information on Ragsdale, so I found myself rereading some of that testimony and looking at other, later testimony provided by Ragsdale. Here’s what I learned.

According to the taped interview of Ragsdale (please note that it is on tape) conducted by Don Schmitt on January 26, 1993, it was clear that Ragsdale said he was in a jeep. Ragsdale said, at one point, “…we got into a damned jeep to take off.”

He also said, during that January 26 interview, “We had the windshield down on the jeep…” This is a nice little detail that underscores the claim that he was in a jeep.

So, it was Ragsdale who said jeep, although he didn’t say a thing about it being a WW2 jeep, and I don’t believe he ever said anything about a car. Of course suggesting it was a WW2 jeep is a logical deduction, given the timing.

I did notice, however, that Ragsdale later claimed it was a pickup truck. In an affidavit which was not properly executed, Ragsdale said, “My friend and I had a pickup truck on this weekend.” So, I didn’t change anything, Ragsdale did. I have been unable to find any reference to a car.

As to the weather that night, I don’t believe I said, “Wild,” but did write, “The night was anything but quiet, as lightning flashed and thunder boomed. A wind, blowing at thirty or forty miles an hour, whipped across the bleak desert landscape.” This information came from an April 24, 1993 interview with Ragsdale at his house in Roswell.

In his 1995 affidavit, Ragsdale claimed, “The weather was perfect, and we were looking up at the stars. A storm was in the west, with lightning, but far away enough we couldn’t hear the thunder.”

Of course, in his 1993 affidavit, which was properly executed, Ragsdale claimed, he was out there “…during a severe lightning storm.”

Again, I didn’t change the testimony but it was changed later, as Ragsdale changed his story. For another example, take the location of the crash, according to what Ragsdale claimed. In his January 26 interview, he kept making reference to the Foster ranch and said, of the location of the crash, “… it’s a good thirty to forty miles.”

In his 1995 affidavit, he said, “A sign post on the Pine Lodge Road indicates ‘53 miles to Roswell’. Near this sign is a road going south toward Pine Lodge… and the turn off to Arabella leads east and south.”

But using a map with Don Schmitt in 1993, he pointed to the El Paso Natural Gas Pipeline north of Roswell and while the pipeline didn’t exist in 1947, in 1993, he used it as a reference point and it was nowhere near the Pine Lodge or Boy Scout Mountain as claimed by Ragsdale.

And finally because I have been accused of not following up on information that might lead away from the extraterrestrial, or in this case, impeaching a witness, Ragsdale claimed that he and his friend, identified as Trudy Truelove, had picked up bits of the metallic debris that exhibited strange qualities. But Ragsdale said that the debris was stolen.

In a very confusing statement, his wife claimed, “Well I had this fiddle that had been passed down for well, I proved that it was passed down for five generations, and I worked with it and it was a Stradivarius. It was very old and very expensive…”

They had been talking about a break-in at the house and the story continued. “Anyway the subject came up and my husband told them about having, you know the box in the house and he made the remark, well where do you keep stuff [the metallic debris] like that? …All they did was riddled the closet…. They went strictly to that closet and anything of value in that closet they took.”

Or, as we understand it, the house was burgled. The burglars went through a closet where the debris was kept and took it. These crooks, according to the Ragsdales, avoided other areas of the house and didn’t touch a coin collection that was in plain sight.

I did contact the Roswell Police asking if there had been any reports of the burglary but they could find no record of it. They did make it clear that the records were somewhat spotty so that crime report might have been destroyed as they purged files.

But even the burglary story has changed. In the 1996 affidavit, Ragsdale said, “My truck and trailer was stolen from my home. Again with material in the truck, never to be heard from anywhere. My home was broken into, completely ransacked and all that was taken was the material, a gun and very little else of value.”

I was also concerned about this claim of a Stradivarius, but have learned that there are some very cheap copies out there, marked with the Stradivarius name, so it didn’t seem impossible for Ragsdale to have one with the Stradivarius name in it. Of course, it wasn’t the expensive one because, had it been, I would have found a police report among other documentation such as a newspaper article.

The point here is that I hadn’t changed the testimony as claimed, but the witness had changed his story and I believe that was under the influence of Max Littell. It became a much better story, filling in the gaps that were in the original such as Ragsdale never getting down, close to the crash but seeing it in the distance the next morning. In the new version he was walking the scene and looking into the wrecked spaceship. My favorite part is his claiming to see a jewel-encrusted throne in the ship… A throne? In a spaceship?

Today I don’t think there are many who believe that Ragsdale saw anything. His testimony is tainted by too many major alterations. In 1997, there was a push to condemn me for what I had written about the tale, but then, I did have the original tape. Statements were taken from others to suggest that they believed Ragsdale’s new story, or showing how I had gotten the original details wrong. Apparently they didn’t bother to review the record. It is easy to sling allegations and difficult to verify facts. Here, the tape proves that I had reported what Ragsdale had said originally, until he decided to make the story better. The fault lies, not at my feet but at Ragsdale’s.

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.