Barbara Dugger and History's Greatest Mysteries

 

I was a little disturbed by the Barbara Dugger (as opposed to Duggar) interview on History’s Greatest Mysteries, which is to say I wondered about some of the information contained in it. Don Schmitt and I interviewed Barbara on March 4, 1991, at her home. She was kind enough to sit down for us and tell us what she remembered about her discussion of the UFO crash with her grandmother, Inez Wilcox, who, for those of you who don’t know, was the wife of Sheriff George Wilcox.

Barbara Dugger

Prior to talking to Barbara, Don and I had interviewed her mother, Elizabeth Tulk and her aunt, Phyllis McGuire. Both of these women were the daughters of the sheriff. Phyllis had been in the jail house during some of the activities when Mack Brazel arrived with a few samples of the metallic debris.

Barbara told us that she and her grandmother, who she called Big Mama, had been watching a program about space when Inez said, according to Barbara, “I have something I have never told anyone and I don’t want you to discuss it with anyone… in the ‘40s, there was a spacecraft, a flying saucer is what they called it, [that] crashed outside of Roswell.”

Barbara continued, telling us what her grandmother had told her. “Your grandfather, George, was sheriff – very hesitant to talk but there was something [that] he said don’t tell anyone.”

Barbara, again quoting her grandmother said, “When the incident happened, the military police came to the jailhouse and told George, and I never told anything about this incident, [that if we] talked about it in any way, not only would we be killed but they would get the rest of the family.”

Barbara asked her grandmother if she had witnessed that threat. “Did you hear them say that Big Mama and she said, ‘Yes, I did.’”

According to Barbara, and I must say that this is in conflict with what some of the other witnesses, including deputies, “Someone came and told my grandfather about this incident that happened outside of Roswell. My grandfather went out there and when he got out there, there was a big burned area when he first approached… they saw debris… I don’t know if he was alone. She [Inez] didn’t go with him. It was in the evening.”

Barbara asked, “Did he see any little space beings? She [Inez] said, ‘Yes. There were four of them… they were like gray… their heads were large and the little suit they had on was like silk or something like that kind of material. They were gray.’”

Barbara was told, “He [George] came back into town and they had discussed the incident. They [the military] had thought it was fine to put it over the news and apparently something happened and it was not okay.”

There were phone calls from all over the world. According to what Barbara was told, “When they found out they came into the jailhouse and said you don’t say anything or you will die and Inez will die…”

Barbara again said, “He went out there to the site. I thought the site was just like thirty miles outside of Roswell… Granddaddy wouldn’t talk about it. It was a shock to him like you wouldn’t believe.”

She provided more of the description of what the sheriff had seen, based on what Inez told her. “There were little people lying out on the ground. [The] military came in and… tell you not to talk about it.”

Oddly, Barbara said that Inez never talked about it again. It was just that one time, though she wrote an article about in the late 1940s. That article does corroborate what Barbara said, but there is a problem with it, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Barbara asked, “Were those little men alive or dead and she said ‘I think one of them was alive,’ and I said, ‘Did Granddaddy help it.?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know,’ and that was that. She didn’t tell me anything else.”

Barbara said that Inez never said another word about it… except, there is that article that Inez wrote about “Four Years in the County Jail.”

This was an article about her experiences working for the county as the matron in the jail. Seems in the 1940s that the sheriff’s wife sort of inherited the job of matron when her husband was elected sheriff. I don’t know if it was a requirement or a bonus that came with the election of George.

In that article, seen here, is the mention of the flying saucer crash, as it was typed by Inez:

 

Inez Wilcox's article about the Roswell crash.

And here is the problem. That paragraph was not in the original story. It was added later. When the Berlitz and Moore book about the crash came out, it was announced in the Roswell Daily Record on June 11, 1980, with another article published on June 13, 1980. Inez’s article is undated and the insert about the crash is undated, but since it was written later as an addition to the original article, it is possible that it was inspired by the release of The Roswell Incident, the articles in the Daily Record and the eventual broadcast on In Search Of, which covered the Roswell story. Inez died on May 25, 1988.

And the additional problem is that the information is third-hand. George was first hand, Inez was second, and Barbara third. She’d seen nothing herself. She was relying on Inez, who had seen very little herself, and none of it had to do with the alien beings. George was no longer available for interview when we arrived on the scene in 1989.

Again, here is the problem. Ben Smith, or one of the producers interviewed Barbara, but they made no attempt to get that paragraph that Inez had written into the show. They made no mention of it. At least the paragraph moved the story to the second hand. But, to trot that out would be to diminish the importance of the Not Jesse Marcel’s Journal. Focus had to remain on the Journal to the exclusion of any other good documentation, with the exception of the Ramey Memo… which, they mentioned in the second episode and then seemed to forget.

Anyway, here is additional analysis of Barbara’s tale. I have no doubt that she believes it to be true. The trouble is that, at this late date, we can’t prove it… and the real shame is that Inez didn’t date anything. That would have helped.