Corporal Pyles and the Roswell Skeptics

Here’s something that I don’t understand. In the rush to condemn all things Roswell, the debunkers often overlook glaring errors on the part of those UFO investigators they wish to believe. As a point in fact, we’ll take a look at what Karl Pflock wrote in his book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and a Will to Believe when he told his version of the story of Corporal E.L. Pyles.

But first, a look at what Don Schmitt and I had to say about Pyles in our book, The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. I had written, “Fifteen miles southwest of the base, Corporal E. L. Pyles, on a detached facility, looked up to see what he thought at first was a shooting star, but larger. It moved across the sky and then arced downward. There seemed to be an orange glow around it, a halo near the front. Pyles believed the event took place between 11:00 p.m. and midnight because the lights at the facility were turned out after 10:30, and he would normally retire before midnight. He thought it was near the weekend, but couldn’t be sure of the exact day.”

Later in the book, in recapping the witnesses who had reported something in the sky, I wrote, “Corporal E. L. Pyles, southwest of Roswell, saw a falling star. He thought it was a falling star because it was ‘wrapped in orange.’ Like the others, he believed it happened just before midnight. It clearly was something large enough and bright enough to be seen thirty or forty miles away.”

Although we hadn’t actually assigned a date to this story, we do make it clear that we believed it happened in early July 1947 and given what we had been told by others, believed that the day was just before midnight on July 4.

Pflock, in his anti-alien Roswell book also reported that he had interviewed Pyles. According to Pflock, “I asked Pyles when this took place. He replied, ‘It was in forty-seven. I don’t remember the month or the date I saw it [emphasis in original]’ It seems it was summertime.’ I then asked him if he was on the main base, Roswell AAF, when he saw the ‘streak’. He said, ‘Yes, I was... I was walking across the drill field... there on the base... [with a] friend of mine... We both saw it.”

Now I freely admit this looks damaging for my research. We, meaning Don and I, had taken the story of a streak of light told by Pyles and put a date on it. It would seem that we were taking a story of a light in the night sky that could have been seen at almost any time in 1947 and placed it in a very narrow range without benefit of witness testimony and, in fact, in contradiction of what the witness told to Pflock. Pretty sloppy work, if that had been true.

But Pflock then wrote, “Next, I pursued the time of night the sighting occurred. Pyles said, ‘Well, it had to have been between, say, eight o’clock, probably... [and] eleven... [I couldn’t] pinpoint the time, but it was before midnight. I think we had been to the club, NCO club.’ A ‘few days later’ he saw the ‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer’ story in the Roswell Daily Record, and he wondered if he and his friend had seen anything to do with it [reproduced here exactly as it appears in Pflock’s book, ellipses and all].”

So, after all the fussing around, and suggesting that Pyles couldn’t even give a month for the sighting and suggesting he barely remembered the year, he then provides a signpost in the available documentation. He said it was in the days prior to the newspaper article, or in other words, it could have been July 4 as we had suggested, and certainly was in that time frame according to what Pyles told Pflock. And we had pinpointed the time as prior to midnight, just as did Pyles in his conversation with Pflock.

What all this meant, in the long run, was that I was catching flack for misrepresenting the Pyles testimony when, in fact, what Pflock learned actually confirmed what we (and here I mean I) had reported. What I didn’t understand then, and what I don’t understand now, is why Pflock made a big deal out of Pyles not knowing when he saw the streak of light and a paragraph later limiting it to the first week in July. Didn’t anyone catch that inconsistency?

In fact, we have Pflock reporting that Pyles couldn’t even remember if it was summer (though he thought it might have been) but then saying that it was after eight and before midnight. Strange, selective memory, it would seem to me, though if you are reporting a light in the sky, it was probably after dark (well, dusk anyway).

Not to mention that no one seems to want to criticize Pflock for what might be an inaccuracy in his reporting. They all assume that he got it right without shading or manipulation and that I, along with Don, got it wrong.

This is the sort of trivia that has been going on for too many years. I now must defend my statements about the timing of Pyles sighting when it seems to me that anyone with any reading comprehension would understand that Pyles had confirmed, to Pflock, the timing of the event. He might not have been able to say July 4, but we, and here I do mean Don and me, had other information that suggested that date when we wrote our book.

In the end, what we see here is that Pyles confirmed the time frame for Pflock, but Pflock, for some reason didn’t seem to understand that Pyles put it in the first week in July. And the skeptics didn’t bother to question this. They just accepted the idea that we were wrong and Pflock was right, when it turned out that Pflock had, basically, confirmed what we had said.