Roswell Nurse Photographs the Bodies - I Don't Think So

 

By happenstance, I came across a YouTube video that claimed an interview with a woman who had been a surgical nurse in Roswell in 1947. The claim was that Margaret Ellen Dodd had been tasked with taking pictures of the alien bodies recovered. She said that she had been told to do this because, as a surgical nurse, she wouldn’t be upset by the circumstances. It was in 1985 that she told the story to an Albuquerque UFO researcher. It was the only time she talked about those events. You can watch the video here, though I do hesitate to provide the url… this really shouldn’t be rewarded, given the circumstances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veF9PaZ10wg

Well, naturally, this caught my attention because in my decades of research, I had never come across this nurse. I seemed to remember that Tom Carey might have mentioned a nurse with that or a similar name, so I sent him an email. While I waited for a response, I made what are the normal checks. She doesn’t appear in the Yearbook created during the summer of 1947 by Walter Haut. She doesn’t appear on the morning reports for that year. Anytime there is activity about a soldier, joining the unit, leaving it, going on leave or returning from leave or being unavailable for duty, that sort of thing, that soldier’s name, or in this case, that nurse’s name would appear in the record. Hers did not.

Tom Carey at the Roswell UFO Museum.

She was reported to be a lieutenant. This meant that she wasn’t a civilian that somehow found herself with that strange assignment… not to mention wondering why they would want a nurse to take the photographs. There was a complete photo lab assigned to the base and if they needed a photographer, one of the men assigned there would have been a better selection. Some of them had even photographed the graphic remains of aircraft accidents.

I hadn’t expected a return to my query quite as quickly as it came. Tom wrote back reporting:

I just spent an entire morning researching the names cited in your email below and basically came up empty because: they're all most likely dead; their ages are/were unknown at any point in time, which would have been a big help in any search; and the alleged nurse's last name ["Dodd"] I assumed was her maiden name but could have been her married name? I don't know. 

Anyway, here's what I did find out, which didn't lead me to a touchdown in the end. In the '47 RAAF yearbook, there is a "Pfc. Willy Dodd" pictured in "Squadron S," which is composed of all black airmen. Since the alleged nurse Margaret Ellen Dodd was an officer, I assumed a relationship as being unlikely. 

More interesting, however, was a listing in my photocopy of the '47 Roswell City Directory for a "Harry Dodd" whose occupation was given as an "orderly at Saint Mary's Hospital" in Roswell. Even though I had no idea of his age, this was interesting enough to spur me to see if I could find this fellow with my search engine using various age groupings. I also limited my search engine to search just the states of NM and AZ for this fellow. To cut to the chase, I could not find a connection of any of the names that resulted with any combination of the nurse's possible names.

Finally, I located an "M.E. Heid" in my copy of the 1993/1994 Roswell White Pages, but according to you[r] email she passed away in 1991 in Tucson, AZ.

That was basically what I had learned as well. No independent corroboration for this tale. We are told in the video that the nurse only spoke with the Albuquerque researcher once and never said anything else about it. According to the video, she had died in 1991 at the age of 67.

However, in video, it is claimed that the researcher produced a report but that was eventually confiscated by the government when he died in 1993, also at 67. He did make eleven copies of it and sent it out to various UFO researchers. I wondered why Stan Friedman hadn’t been one of them. Had he had that report, then his book, written with Don Berliner, would have carried the tale. It did not.

In fact, I wondered why none of those researchers ever stepped forward with their copy. A document like that, created in 1985 before the case blew up in the 1990s would have been very valuable.

There were other red flags, things that only those of us who had been researching the case for decades would know. The hospital at the base, in 1947, wasn’t the fancy brick structure that was created in the 1950s. It was a series of buildings that housed the various specialties and functions. A nurse who had been assigned there would have known that.

The last of the original base hospital buildings. The others are long gone.

Tom did one other thing. He sent a copy of my email to Tony Bragalia to see what he could learn. He provided the following information from the content creator, Contact Redacted, with the important points highlighted by Tony:

I've always been fascinated by aliens, UFOs, classified reports, and the mysteries surrounding them, including alleged abduction and contact accounts. On this channel, we'll examine the evidence and explore what may have been lost, erased, or kept hidden. Disclaimer: This channel features exploratory interpretations and speculation about unexplained phenomena, presented through investigative-style storytelling rather than established fact. The perspectives and visual representations are dramatized or creatively constructed for storytelling purposes. Some visuals may be generated, enhanced, altered, or reconstructed using automated or generative artificial intelligence tools to create a more immersive viewing experience. The content presented here should not be considered factual and is intended solely for commentary and entertainment.

This then, should end any acceptance of the tale as real. The content creator tells us that the content should not be considered factual. Apparently, those who have posted comments to the video didn’t bother to check out his bio and see he had created three other videos (as of this writing) in a similar vein.

This should be the end of this. A story told for entertainment but not as a part of the history of the Roswell case. But then I looked at the comments and was further appalled by what some of those said. They were treating the story as if real but adding to it. Glenn Dennis was mentioned several times, but Dennis invented his connection to the Roswell crash and the story of a missing nurse. Dennis had said that she had been killed in an aircraft accident that claimed four other nurses.

Glenn Dennis in the mid-1990s.

Back in the early 1990s, both Don Berliner and I searched for evidence of that aircraft accident. I won’t go into the details because I have reported on them several times in books, articles and on this blog. There was no evidence of such a crash.

The point is that there seem to be many out there who still accept the Dennis tale as accurate, though the truth has been available for decades. There are those who tell us who Dennis’s nurse might be, mentioning real nurses who were in Roswell in 1947, but that hasn’t panned out either. And when Vic Golubic confronted Dennis about the name of the nurse Dennis had provided (Naomi Self, or Selff), Dennis then said that wasn’t her real name. Golubic managed to obtain a roster of some 125,000 nurses who had served in the Army but Naomi Self didn’t appear on that massive roster.

Back when Dennis first began telling the tale, told me that he had warned us that he wasn’t going to give us the real name. But he never said that to me, nor did he tell those others such as Karl Pflock and Philip Klass. Had Klass had the information back in the early 1990s, he would have spread the information far and wide. Now, confronted by the fact that we had actually proved a negative, that no one by the name Naomi Self had been stationed at Roswell, he changed the name.  For me, the lie about her name was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In 1997, in The Roswell Report, I outlined all this, meaning that information has been available for three decades. The Glenn Dennis lies just will not die.

I’m stuck in an endless loop of trying to publish accurate information about the Roswell case, but the false things we have been told and the witnesses who were less than candid keep popping up. Dennis made up the tale. Now we have Contact Redacted inventing a new one that is being immediately accepted as real.

Before I sign off here, just let me say that anyone could have attempted to follow up on this through sources available on the Internet. Anyone looking at it should have seen the red flags… witnesses that are dead so they can’t be questioned, names of people who weren’t in Roswell in 1947, a failure to understand military protocol, and a failure to produce an alleged taped interview with one of the witnesses or a copy of that original report that has eleven copies out there, somewhere.

Sadly, the easiest way to check this out was to click on the content creator’s name that would have taken you to his website, where he tells you this is a story that he invented. That should be the final line in this but Tom and I wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the tale. I just can’t wait for the next time someone cites this as important new information when all it does is obscure the truth.

The Roswell Festival - The FBI Telex

 

While on the Roswell Panel at the Festival, I mentioned that we’d found no documents relating to the Roswell crash/retrieval in all the data that had been dumped in the last few months. This is an important point that I’ll come back to later.

The International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell.

One of the panelists, and I don’t remember who, mentioned that the FBI Telex that had originated in the Dallas office on July 8, 1947, was included. Importantly, the only thing that had been redacted in that document said, “Major Curtan [actually Kirton] further advised that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not [two words redacted] borne out this belief.”

It was mentioned that the whole line had been redacted. If true, this was an important discovery because it suggested that someone had redacted the one line that told us the balloon explanation had been denied by those at Wright Field. This would suggest that the transparency claims were not true.

Reacting that line made no sense to me because we’d had an unredacted version of the Telex for more than three decades with nothing redacted. In fact, when the GAO made their investigation in the mid-1990s, the complete, unredacted version as published (with the exception of those two words mentioned earlier).

I believed that the document had surfaced in the third of the data dumps. I searched for it but couldn’t find it. I then sent out an email to many colleagues because, as I say, this could be an important find. I figured someone would have the information, saving me the time looking for it.

Within an hour I learned from Joachim Koch that the document had surfaced in the first of those data dumps. He sent the link to the specific set of documents. It was on page 70 of a much longer document. See can see the file here:

65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_001

The problem, however, is that the whole line was not redacted as had been suggested. Just two words were eliminated and it seemed that it was because of a misspelling. What might have been an important find turned out to be an overreacting to deleting a misspelling. The redaction, while not necessary was of little consequence.

But that led me to another aspect of this. There are many of us looking for information about the Roswell crash/retrieval in those data dumps. Say what you will, take whatever position you believe… it was alien, it was terrestrial, it was Mogul… the newspapers on July 8 and July 9, were filled with stories about the crash. In fact, some of them carried a timeline that covered the release of the information to the conclusion that it was a balloon. The whole cycle lasted about three hours. That means from the time that the press release was given to the media to the time that General Roger Ramey claiming was just a weather balloon.

Walter Haut, the 509^th Bomb Group officer who handed out that press release told me, as he had anyone who asked, that he received telephone calls from around the world and a stack of post cards and letters asking for more information. Haut regretted that he hadn’t save those cards and letters for the stamps on them. We know that reporters were covering the story and again, I spoke to many of them but they were diverted to the balloon story almost from the time they learned at it. At that point, the story died.

Walter Haut at home in 1991. Photo by Kevin Randle

For that short period, this was a very important, front-page story that had all the news media chasing it. Mark Rodeghier even found a national ABC news radio broadcast about it and I have dozens of those newspaper clippings as well.

Here’s the point for those of us who have searched through the data dumps about UAP which are supposed to prove the transparency of the new government policy. I ask, where is the information about Roswell? Where are the newspaper clippings because, in these data dumps, there are dozens of newspaper articles that include other claims of UFO crashes.

The very first article found in the pdf. which contains the FBI Telex, is a July 8 story about a Catholic priest, Joseph Brasky, who found a metal disk. The object was about 18 inches in diameter, resembled a saw blade and was still warm when Brasky found it. He reported the find to the FBI. They seemed uninterested in it.

The point? This obviously terrestrial artifact is reported at length, but the Roswell case, is oddly missing.  There should be other mentions of it. In the Project Blue Book files, there is a single mention of the crash and that refers to a telephone call from Washington, criticizing the officers at Roswell for releasing the information. It is the third paragraph in a four-paragraph newspaper story in another article. All this suggests that the claim of transparency is little more than lip service. At least until we get data we didn’t already have.

Roswell Festival 2026

 

For those interested, I was at the Roswell Festival over the July 4^th weekend. I look at this as an opportunity to connect with other UFO researchers and those who had UFO experiences. This year, among those there were Don Schmitt, Travis Walton, Kathleen Marden, Ben Hansen, Thom Reed, Frank Kimbler, Marc D’Antonio and Dennis Balthaser. Along with the individual presentations, there were panel discussions on the Roswell case and alien abductions.

The International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell.

Ironically, I sat in on the Abduction Panel with Travis and Kathleen. I was there to talk about the Hickson/Parker abduction from Pascagoula in 1973. What had impressed me about this case was there were witnesses to the abduction, four of them named in an Air Force document dated the next day. That underscored the validity of the report.

Kathleen mentioned that there were similar revelations about the Barney and Betty Hill case, meaning additional witnesses, not to mention the radar tracking from Pease AFB and an Air Force investigation that was less then reliable. She didn’t supply the names of the witnesses and I didn’t ask, which I should have.

She also mentioned there had been some updated work on the Marjorie Fish star map model that had been described by Betty Hill. Fish gathered astronomical data about the stars around our sun out to about fifty light years. It was Fish who discovered that the Zeta Reticuli star system might be the home world of some of the alien visitors.

Kathleen Marden

In the past, I had been critical of Fish’s work. It was an exceptional job, but the data she used was now out of date. Star system distances have been updated with some moving in and others moving out of her designed range. She also left out red dwarf stars because there are so many within fifty light years of Earth. Her thinking was there would be no reason to visit those systems, but our latest data suggests some of red dwarf systems are worthy of attention. I mention this here but it didn’t come up during the panel discussion.

One of the things about the festival is that you get to meet many people who have had UFO experiences. Of those, a man of about thirty-five or forty told me about seeing an object come out of the sea, hesitate for several seconds and then climb away at high speed. He was close enough to get a good look at it. He said the UFO was rounded, maybe more egg-shaped than circular and had a blue haze surrounding it.

I also talked with a guy who had seen a triangular-shaped UFO that hovered overhead for four to five minutes, before drifting to the west. As it began to move, an Air Force fighter appeared in the east. I’m not sure if that was coincidence or deliberate, but the presence of the fighter appeared to have caused the rapid acceleration of the UFO.

And I talked to a few people who had multiple sightings. In the Project Blue Book days, they would have been labeled as repeaters and their reports would be automatically rejected. One of the men talked of seeing glowing balls of light in the distance, somewhat reminiscent of the World War II Foo Fighters.

I always thought of the repeaters as being lucky. There was a man, not at the festival, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records had been struck by lightning five times. The very definition of a repeater who proved that some people were in the right place (or in his case the wrong place) to make multiple sightings.

The point here is that it is never proper technique to dismiss a witness or evidence because of a personal bias. Some people have the luck and some don’t. I’ve said that my only possible sighting was a point of light in a polar orbit seen in early 1967. Given the timing, I don’t believe it was one of ours, meaning Earth based, but then it was just a point of light flying from north to south at a steady speed.

There was a panel discussion about the Roswell case but it didn’t dwell on the well-known aspects of it. There was a question about the destruction of classified material during that panel and a fact that was discovered by the search for documents. There is also the question about why documents of historical significance would be destroyed. Although there is talk of a nefarious purpose, I noted that as an intelligence officer, I had destroyed many documents. Most were irrelevant to my mission and others were out of date, requiring destruction.

I did note that those communications and documents created at the highest levels would have been preserved but without a proper name we might never find them. I mentioned a FOIA request I had submitted for a document. I had the name of the document, the name of the author, the name of the organization for which it was created and the date on the document. My request was refused because they wanted more specific information. It was an excuse to refuse releasing the material by fulfilling the requirements of the FOIA law without providing the requested information.

Maria Tellier, the MUFON New Mexico director gave a presentation on the 1964 Holloman UFO landing. The case was the alleged communication between one of the alien races visiting Earth and several high-ranking humans stationed at Holloman AFB. According to information published in UFO’s Past, Present and Future by Robert Emenegger in 1974, “The [base] commander and two officers, along two base Air Force scientists arrive [at the UFO landing site] and wait apprehensively. A panel slides open on the side of the craft.

“Stepping forward, there are one, then a second and a third – what appear to be men dressed in tight-fitting jump suits. Perhaps short by our standards, with an odd gray-green complexion, eyes set wide apart. A large, pronounced nose. They wear headpieces that resemble rows of a rope-like design.”

I mention all this for those who might not be aware of the rumored landing of a craft at Holloman Air Force Base. According to Emenegger, there is film of the landing. While I find the tale wild even by UFO standards, Tellier provided an interesting take on the story.

There were a wide range of other activities, most of which I didn’t attend. The festival has expanded beyond the research aspects of the Roswell case to become a celebration of alien visitation. Many of the businesses have an alien theme and one of the McDonald’s restaurants has a definite flying saucer aspect to it.

The Roswell Flying Saucer McDonal's Restaurant.

There were a costume contest, a 5K race and a parade. Main Street in front of the museum was closed off for vendors who provided a variety of food and other souvenirs. Of course, it was hot out in the street, so I stayed in the museum where there was air conditioning.

Main Street closed and filled with the vendors.

Finally, one comment. During Travis’s presentation, two young men who had a video camera and an agenda, interrupted the show to ask pointed questions. It was clear that they were looking for clicks and while it was Travis’s job to answer those questions, they should have waited until the presentation was over. The audience had no interest in their opinions. Sometimes those playing journalist seem to believe they are owed answers. In reality, they should have been interested in the truth rather than creating a video for clicks.

I had a very good time in Roswell. The staff of the museum was courteous and worked to make sure everything ran smoothly. The one unscripted presentation came when one of the speakers didn’t arrive. Don was asked to fill in, and I suggested we do something together. It had been a long time since we had been on stage together, but it worked well. As Don said later, “Just like old times.”

We have already talked about doing that next year.

And as a commercial message, I have a new UFO book to be published on August 25, called UFO Sightings and Alien Visitation. It is a book that follows my chasing footnotes, providing some solutions to UFO cases and underscoring the reality of others.