New Documentation for Roswell: The Easley Letter

 

As anyone who has been following the Roswell case knows, we, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and I, have been searching for documentation for, literally, decades. We have, of course, all the newspaper articles, the FBI Telex, and one or two hints of something strange falling outside Roswell. We have no diaries, letters, journals or other written statements from the time of the crash that mention the crash. One of the possible exceptions is a magazine article written by Inez Wilcox, wife of the sheriff, that mentions the little men. The problem is that there is no date on it, and the article might have been written after the Roswell crash became prominent in 1978. We need something from 1947.

Don and me on the Impact Site.

We did find a diary that had been kept by Ruth Barnett. Her niece, Alice Knight told me that she had found the diary in a box of material she had received after the death of her aunt. The diary, a daily reminder book for the year 1947, was in there and Ruth used it as a diary. She made entries for the entire year of 1947 and there is no mention of any UFO crash on the Plains of San Agustin.

Stan Friedman, when I met him so that we could copy the diary, suggested that Barney Barnett had been warned about keeping quiet, so he wouldn’t have told Ruth about his adventures over on the Plains. However, according to Vern Maltais, a good friend of Barnett, said that he’d learned of the crash when Barney told him about it at Thanksgiving. That suggests that Barnett wasn’t cowed by the orders to remain quiet, and even if he hadn’t mentioned it in July, he was talking about it in November. There is no notation in the diary about this amazing story that Barney had shared with friends and family during that Thanksgiving get together. There is just nothing said about it until Bill Moore interviewed Barnett’s boss after 1978.

The other document, to surface recently was the alleged diary of Jesse Marcel. This was a standard Army “Memorandum” book that the Army handed out by the hundreds of thousands over the years. I’d had several of them during my military career. Since that book was found in Jesse Marcel’s the possessions, it might have provided a clue about the crash. Unfortunately, once again, there was nothing in it to suggest a crash. To make it worse, handwriting analysis suggested that Marcel had not made the notations in the book.

I have learned in the last several months there was another officer in the office with Marcel. Major Dalton Smith was assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in 1947, and his office number matches that of Marcel. I know nothing much about Smith, other than he was there in 1947 and had the same number. It suggests to me that Smith might be the author of the notations in the Memorandum book. And since the notations aren’t all that personal, when Smith left the 509^th, he left that book behind… Or, when Marcel left, he threw it in box with other items. At any rate, there is nothing of consequence in the book.

The notable one exception to all this was a two-paragraph mention in a Saga magazine article published in the Winter 1974 issue. B. Ann Slate and Stan Friedman, in the article “UFO Battles the Air Force Couldn’t Coverup,” report that Lydia Sleppy had said that her attempt to put the story of the crash over the news wire had been interrupted.  You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/05/lydia-sleppy-1973-interview.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/reports-of-roswell-crash-before-jesse.html

So, we now reach the latest bit of corroboration. I believe that I’m the only researcher to have ever interviewed Major Edwin Easley, the base provost marshal in 1947. He would have been responsible for security at the crash site and on the base. In my interviews, he told me, several times that he couldn’t talk about it because he had been sworn to secrecy. He said that he had promised the president he wouldn’t talk about it.

Skeptics, of course, criticized the statement, wondering if the president would talk to a lowly major. I was of the opinion Easley certainly could have made the promise to an emissary of the president. Both Don and I had learned of several secret service agents who had been dispatched to Roswell in 1947. 

Major Edwin Easley

In a letter dated December 30, 1947, and addressed to Colonel Blanchard, the Roswell base commander, we do have some corroboration for Easley’s help. While the opening paragraph seems to be seasonal boilerplate, meaning it talks about the season and “Your efforts in our behalf repeatedly served to great advantage.”

The second paragraph is the important one. It says, “In these regards, Major Edwin D. Easley, Provost Marshal and his able staff has been particularly helpful. Their intelligent understanding of investigative problems, their devotion and their untiring diligence, regardless of circumstances, had been directly responsible for the successful conclusion of many difficult undertakings.”

The Easley Letter

While this can be viewed as a generic “atta-boy” letter, it is relevant because of the timeframe, 1947, and that I currently know of no other event in which Easley would have been involved in something with the Secret Service. It does underscore Easley’s involvement and helps establish that Easley might well have promised the president that he wouldn’t talk about it by making that promise to the Secret Service representative rather to the president directly. As I have said, this is the latest document relating to the Roswell crash and one of the few that we have.

Lue Elizondo and Two Crashes on the Same Day

 

While I was reading the material posted to the Anomalist website (www.anomalist.com), I followed a couple of links and came to a story headlined, “’Roswell Was Real, Claimed Apollo 14 Astronaut, Elizondo Suggests 2 UFOs Crashed That Day.” (No, the headline is not suggesting that Elizondo was an astronaut… I think they needed a semi-colon rather than a comma to make it clear.)

That headline intrigued me because of the suggestion that two UFOs had crashed on the same day. This was the theory spun by Stan Friedman in an attempt to validate the Plains of San Agustin crash site identified by Barney Barnett. Friedman’s theory was that the UFOs had collided with one falling to the Brazel (Foster) ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and the other coming down farther to the west, on the Plains.

I do not believe there was a crash on the Plains in July 1947, and the reason that theory was ever considered was that the original information, provided by Jesse Marcel, Sr., had no mention of alien bodies. Barney Barnett, however, who lived in Socorro, New Mexico, did tell of something falling on the Plains and that he had seen the bodies of an alien flight crew. Ruth Barnett kept a diary for all of 1947, and there is no mention of anything like that in her written record. I have explored this in the past, at length, and you can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/07/finding-ruth-barnett-diary.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-plains-of-san-agustin-crash.html

The point is, given the information I have uncovered and the investigation that I conducted, there was no evidence substantiate the dual crash aspect of the Roswell case. In one of the more notorious tales told, Gerald Anderson, said that he was on the Plains that day and saw the crashed craft and the alien creatures. Friedman continued to support Anderson long after it was clear that Anderson lied about his involvement. You can read more about that here, but you need to scroll down to find the relevant information about Anderson:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/08/stan-friedman-vs-philip-klass-whats.html

Don Schmitt at the Anderson crash site with the Plains behind him. In the far distance is
the location of the bat cave where scientists were working beginning on July 1. They would have 
seen the crash had there been one, but none of them did.

To me, if Elizondo was, in fact, saying that two UFOs crashed that day, it suggested he was not on the inside because two UFOs had not crashed that day. The Barnett tale had been single witness with no corroboration, and in fact, scientists who were in the area at the time and who had a perfect view of the entire Plains, did not corroborate the story. Given all that, it seemed that Elizondo might not have been the insider that he claimed.

However…

And you knew there would be a “however”…

I wanted to know exactly what he had said, and I wanted to know where he had said it. According to the story in the Roswell Daily Record, Elizondo said, “Before I was part of AATIP, I had no idea about Roswell, other than that there was sort of some alleged crash at some point and some farmer found debris – but during my time with AATIP, there was some very interesting anecdotal information that suggests there wasn’t just one crash, there may have been two crashes, and that somehow it may have been related to some sort of testing that was being done at the time at White Sands, and that the material was recovered.”

He didn’t add much in that article about what he knew, only that these were things that he had heard from those who had been around since the days of Project Blue Book. This is exactly the same sort of thing that Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and I have heard for many years from people who were actually in Roswell at the time or who were in the Army Air Forces when the object crashed. Brigadier General Arthur

Arthur Exon

Exon, for example, provided us with these same stories about what he had heard when he was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1947. Exon even talked about the recovery of alien creatures and what happened to the bodies once they had been moved out of Roswell.

My original purpose here was to suggest that if Elizondo was talking about two crashes on the same day, that would tend to undercut his importance to the UFO investigation given that there was only the single event. But the newspaper story doesn’t say anything about two crashes on the same day, only that there were two crashes. And, he says that these were anecdotal tales he had been told, not that he had seen documents or classified studies which changes the importance of what he said. Only that he had heard these things from others who he suggested would have known the truth.

This turned out not to be much of a chase for accurate information. I guess you could say that it was a “nothing burger.” I was intrigued by the headline that was inaccurate and reading the whole story gave the correct information. It does, however, show that Roswell is still alive in the UFO world.

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.