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.