Finding the Ruth Barnett Diary

I recently posted that we had been looking for any documents, diaries, journals, personal letters or anything else from July 1947 that mentioned the Roswell case without luck. That wasn’t exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This doesn’t relate directly to Roswell, but it had been attached to the information about it for decades.

Barney Barnett claimed to have seen a crashed flying saucer on the Plains of San Agustin. There are those who believe that this happened in July 1947 and the wrecked craft had collided with the one that fell on the Foster (Brazel) ranch. I don’t subscribe to that theory and believe the evidence for it is weak at best and more likely nonexistent. But, as I say, that’s my opinion.

Magdalena Ranger Station at the edge of the Plains of
San Agustin. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

As we, and by we, I mean Don Schmitt and I investigated the Roswell case, we were also interested in what Barney Barnett had said. I had been in touch with Alice Knight, the niece of Ruth and Barney Barnett. I asked, as had others, if there were any written documents that related to what Barney had claimed to have seen. The answer had always been, “No.”

Then, one day, a couple of decades ago, as I talked with her, the answer changed to, “I found a diary for 1947.”

This was a “Daily Reminder” book that someone had given to Ruth Barnett. She kept is faithfully for the year of 1947. And for the dates of the crash (and I mean dates because there have been a number of them offer) it seems that Barney was in no position to see anything out on the Plains. He was in Socorro on those days, including July 5, the date that Gerald Anderson claimed he had seen Barney on the Plains.

The point is the diary, however. We know where Barney was and what he was doing. During that first week in July, there is no hint that Barney had seen anything extraordinary. That sort of documentation, from the right time, is difficult to ignore.

Oh sure, the answer is that Barney had been sworn to secrecy and, of course, didn’t say a word about it to Ruth. She wouldn’t know anything about the crash and therefore couldn’t have written anything about it in her diary.

But, there is another aspect to this. According to family and friends, Barney told them about the crash at a Thanksgiving dinner in 1947. That means the secret was out and Barney felt comfortable enough to talk about it to family. But, again, the diary holds no information about this event either.

I think everyone sees the problem. We find a document written in 1947 by someone who might not have seen the crash but whose husband did. She didn’t mention it in her diary. Not when it happened and not when he told her, other members of the family and friends about it. This, I believe, argues forcibly against a crash on the Plains in July 1947. We find a document, and there is absolutely no hint about flying saucers or crashes in it. Somehow, this bit of information is overlooked when we talk about the Plains… It should be one of the first things mentioned.

MJ-12 and 1985

While I know that many people are tired of the arguments about the authenticity of MJ-12, and while I really don’t want to open up another assault on my integrity based on my objections to MJ-12 documents, I have discovered something about them that hasn’t been reported. It suggests, once again, who might have had a hand in creating the documents, and it reinforces the idea that these documents were created in the mid-1980s for personal gain and not in 1952 for the President-elect.

I was searching for another file, when I noticed one that was out of place. I opened it out of curiosity and found some notes that related to MJ-12. What this told me was that at the UFO Expo West in Los Angeles on May 11, 1991, Jaime Shandera was lecturing about the Plains of San Agustin. He had this to say:

The people that supposedly found stuff in Socorro did not find stuff in Socorro. The party of archaeological people and the Barney Barnett part of the story; they were at the Corona site, not in Socorro [Plains of San Agustin]. I know [this is] the way you understand it because it’s the way it’s always been written and even the way it was written in The Roswell Incident. That’s wrong. There is new evidence that it was all in the Corona site. The way it happened was this – there were not two sites that were more than one hundred miles or so apart … and the so-called Roswell site was just outside of Corona. The archaeologists and Barney Barnett part of it, that was over in Corona. There was no person that found anything in San Agustin.

Remember, this was in May 1991, and had nothing to do with what Don Schmitt and I had written in our book, UFO Crash at Roswell, that would be published in July 1991, though we had come to the same conclusion. Barnett was not over on the Plains. In May 1991, no one had seen Ruth Barnett’s diary, which, of course, ended the discussion. Karl Pflock and I would publish an article some ten years later that not only suggested that Barnett had not seen the object on the Plains, but that his story had nothing at all to do with Roswell crash.

On that same day, that is May 11, 1991, Antonio Huneeus and Javier Sierra interviewed Bill Moore about some of the things that Shandera had said earlier. Moore was talking about the Gerald Anderson tale and why he did not accept it as authentic. (Interestingly, one of the reasons he rejected it was because the military was segregated in 1947, not realizing that white officers commanded the black units, so one of his reasons for rejecting the tale is false, but that doesn’t matter here.) He confirmed that he was on board with Shandera about the Plains, saying, “There is no reason to believe anything occurred on the Plains of San Agustin on that particular date.…”

Which is, of course, what I and many others have been saying for years. Nothing happened on the Plains. But then Moore said the thing that is quite revelatory. He said, “The original hypothesis was that the object had come down in two places, the first being the Brazel site, the second being the Plains of San Agustin, and that in 1985 I abandoned [it] simply because the only witness who put the thing in the Plains of San Agustin at all was Barnett’s boss, Danley, [who] it turned out, was not sure of the place, and it turned out that Barnett could have been up at the Brazel site…”

Here’s what we know now. According to the documentation supplied by Moore in various arenas, Shandera received the Eisenhower Briefing Document on December 11, 1984. This is based on their displaying of a mailing envelope with a December 1984 date on it (postmarked from Albuquerque, which I mention simply because if I don’t someone will criticize the lack of my noting it) but we have no way of knowing if that envelope actually contained the film. There is nothing to tie it to the film and the EBD. We can document the first public mention of the EBD by a London newspaper on May 3, 1987, though Just Cause did publish a list of members of MJ-12 in December 1985 but not the documents themselves. Prior to that, we have nothing that is reliable about the EBD. We can accept the December 11, 1984, date as reliable, or we can reject it. It actually means little because it is impossible to prove that the date is accurate.

Now, based on the 1991 interview, we have Moore’s statement that he had rejected the idea of a Plains of San Agustin crash in 1985 which, as I noted, is interesting. He tells us that he has rejected it because Danley couldn’t actually provide a location or date for Barnett’s story. This is something that I had noticed when I interviewed “Fleck” Danley in October 1990. It was clear that he couldn’t remember much about what Barnett had said and had I been of a mind, I could have convinced him of almost anything. I realized that his information was severely compromised.

But here’s the thing. Moore, in 1991, was saying that he rejected the Plains of San Agustin in 1985, not because he had in his hand the EBD which mentioned nothing of a crash there, but because he found the Danley information to be wanting. It would seem to me that if I was in possession of a document which gave me precise information about a UFO crash and that had been prepared for the man who would be taking over as President in a few months, that would be the most important source for a change in the basic story. If the Plains was left out of the briefing that would tell me that the information about the Plains was inaccurate and that would be a better source than that of a witness who was easily confused. Or, in other words, I would have said I have a document that tells me the Plains story is no good.

That is, unless I know something about the EBD that others don’t know. If I know the source of the EBD, and I know the document can’t be trusted, then I don’t use it to suggest there was no crash on the Plains. I say something about the lack of reliability of Danley’s testimony.

The other side of this is that we can trace the EBD back to Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera and no further. They are the sources for this document and it seems that they, or at least Moore, are not confident enough in it to use is as source material for his analysis of the situation in 1947. That tells us something very important about the EBD. It tells us that Moore finds the EBD unreliable, and if he has no confidence in it, why should the rest of us?

I will say one other thing. The information contained in the EBD was the best available in the mid-1980s. This is proved once again by Moore’s comment that he abandoned the Plains idea in 1985. He is telling us quite a bit in that one short statement. We should all listen to what he had to say about this because it does answer a couple of burning questions.