Harold Bremmer, the Gray Alien, and the Final Analysis

 I suppose I’ll be condemned as a member of the military establishment whose purpose is to debunk UFO reports. That statement is an outgrowth from one of the reviews left for UFO Sightings and Alien Visitation. That laughable review has overlooked my work, along with that of Don Schmitt and Tom Carey to uncover the Roswell crash/retrieval story. Because of that work, I’m offended by something that is now appearing on YouTube and though I really don’t wish to provide any publicity for the website, it is necessary.

The latest entry on The Gray Files is the story of Harold Brenner, a doctor who allegedly sat with a dying gray alien for forty days. I could point out there is no documentation placing a doctor named Harold Brenner in Roswell in July 1947. Yes, one of the sources I used was the Yearbook of the soldiers stationed at the base that summer that was produced by Walter Haut. Haut said that some ten to fifteen percent of the personnel were not in that yearbook.

I also have a copy of the base telephone directory that provides information about those officers assigned to the base in July. Harold Brenner was allegedly a doctor which means he was an officer and his name and telephone number should be included, but is not.

I have copies of the Unit Histories produced during that same time period. I found no reference to a doctor named Brenner… Yes, I know that there would be no mention of the UFO crash in the Unit Histories because it was classified as secret but the intelligence about the crash was more highly classified, meaning reference to it could not be included. That does not exclude Brenner from appearing in the Yearbook if he was in Roswell in 1947.

There were other things. Clearly, the author or content creator of The Gray Files didn’t know that in 1947, the base hospital was a collection of buildings that each held a specific function. Some of us who entered the Army in the late 1960s had physicals and treatments in similar facilities. The brick base hospital was not built until the 1950s. A doctor assigned there in 1947 would have known that.

The last standing remnant of the old hospital. It was one of several such buildings

Of course, the tale of Harold Brenner isn’t the only story about contact and interaction with grays. There are several exciting videos, none of which are based in reality. No, you don’t have to take my word for it. The Gray Files website includes the following:

Disclaimer: The Gray Files presents speculative, documentary-style storytelling, not verified fact. Stories and visuals are dramatized for entertainment, and some imagery is created or enhanced with generative AI. Nothing here should be taken as factual. All names, characters and events are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental. Real places and historical events serve only as background.

My problem here isn’t that the content creator is producing videos about the grays, it’s that there are those who accept the videos as accurate. There are two comments in that statement tell us that the presentations are “speculative, documentary-style storytelling, not verified fact.” and “Nothing here should be taken as factual.” The disclaimer should be posted far and wide. I don’t really wish to have questions directed at me to verify the information. The content creator has already answered the question. The stories are just that – stories.

Watch the videos but understand they are not the real stories. They shouldn’t be taken as the truth. I had thought that the content creator should acknowledge that in the videos but realized that would ruin the illusion he wishes to create. It would ruin a good story, but it must be remembered that it is a story.

Oh, one other thing. He has two books for sale and this is a way of promoting those books. Keep that in mind as you watch the videos. It’s all very exciting but it is no more real than The Thing from Another World.

A Look at a Portion of Jay Stratton's "Out of the Shadows"

 I freely admit that this is based more on the information found in reviews and promotional material about Jay Stratton’s book, Out of the Shadows, than it is about what we find in the book as a whole. I want to address his comments about the Roswell UFO crash/retrieval because that tells us something about the value of the book and his expertise. Those who visit here regularly know that I, along with Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, have been investigating the Roswell events for more than three decades. For example, Don and I interviewed Bill Brazel, one of the sons of the man who found the wreckage, in February 1989. That interview was recorded and provided some insight into the case that was unique at the time. In fact, Stan Friedman used that interview in his book with neither credit nor attribution to help validate his work.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the Debris Field in March 1989. Photo by Kevin Randle.

In Stratton’s book, according to a reporter who interviewed him, Johnny Dodd, Stratton wrote about an “80-year long disinformation campaign” covering the attempts to reverse engineer recovered alien craft and technology by various defense contractors who held material in their secure facilities. I’ll note here that those contractors don’t fall under the FOIA regulations and claims of proprietary information allows them to refuse all FOIA requests. It is a good way for the government to bury information out of the reach of FOIA, but that’s an argument for another time.

Stratton said, “The Roswell crash of 1947, confirmed by a source: ‘The crash broke into two pieces, and everything was recovered — the crash and non-human bodies.’”

What is extraordinary about this is that Tom, Don and I have been saying those same things for thirty years. But what separates us from Stratton is that we interviewed the men who were in Roswell in 1947 and those who participated in the recovery and the coverup. We interviewed every member of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff with two notable exceptions about their roles in the recovery. Each of them, including those we didn’t interview but who were questioned by others, provided information that the event was real with lone the except of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Barrowclough, the base executive officer, the third highest-ranking officer there.

Major Edwin Easley, the Provost Marshal in Roswell in 1947, and the man in charge of security at the two crash sites, made many interesting comments to me during several interviews. He repeatedly said that he couldn’t talk about it because he had been sworn to secrecy and that he had promised the President that he wouldn’t reveal what he knew. While I’m sure that he didn’t speak directly to the President, he did tell the President’s representative that he wouldn’t talk about it. However, he told me, indirectly during a telephone conversation with me while I was at the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago that the path to the extraterrestrial was not the wrong path to follow. We have a letter dated late in 1947, from the Secret Service, thanking him for his recent assistance which seems to confirm part of what Easley said.

Before you mention the contradiction in the above, I’ll note that in my interviews with Easley, I had the impression that he wanted to help with our investigation but that pesky promise not to talk got in the way. Telling me that Brazel was held in the guest house at the base, for example, didn’t violate that promise because we already knew that Brazel had been held in Roswell for six to ten days. Easley just told me that Brazel wasn’t in the stockade, but in nicer quarters at the BOQ. That he was not allowed to leave without a military escort underscored the jail like nature of his stay.

Stratton said that he learned in the course of his work, citing an insider, that the “much-discussed, much-mocked stories of a UAP crash in Roswell, N.M. — complete with dead extraterrestrials — are true.” But he doesn’t identify the source of this extraordinary information. Such information must be thought of as suspicious. Before you mention that we, Tom, Don and I, have reported the same thing, I’ll note that we do identify our sources.

Tony Bragalia has reported that Stratton's source for his Roswell statements was a high-up guy at Lockheed-Martin whose last name was Ryder, now deceased. According to Tony, Ryder took over the famous "Skunk Works" after its founder, Kelly Johnson, passed away.

Tom noted that we know that the Roswell UFO did not "break-into-two-pieces " as Ryder claimed. We know there were two sites where wreckage was found. One was the Debris Field where Mack Brazel discovered the broken-up pieces of wreckage and the second site where the craft and bodies were found.

General Arthur Exon told Tom, Don and me, that bodies had been recovered and that one had been sent to an Army facility in the Denver area to study ways to preserve the sample. Gathering the remains of alien creatures wasn’t something that happened every day. While Exon said that he hadn’t seen the bodies himself, he did say he was told this by fellow officers at Wright Field who had been directly involved about them. The point here is that a retired Air Force general was telling us that bodies had been recovered long before Stratton made his revelations.

Regarding that aspect of the case, Dodd wrote that Stratton claimed one alien survived. According to Dodd’s reporting: “Some were dead on arrival. Others, allegedly, were alive but later perished, refusing food or contact. Communication was limited and often futile.” 

We learned long ago from various witnesses that one or more of the aliens had survived the crash. Part of that information came indirectly from Dan Dwyer, a Roswell firefighter who visited the site in his personal car and Sheriff George Wilcox who told his wife that one of the creatures had survived the crash. Barbara Dugger, granddaughter of the sheriff wondered if he had tried to help the surviving entity.

Roswell Fire Fighters including Dan Dwyer, witness to the bodies.

In other words, Stratton is providing nothing new here. Tom, Don and I had been reporting this for more than three decades. I have reported on this on this blog many times.

Regarding these entities, as described to Stratton, he writes: “Some were dead on arrival. Others, allegedly, were alive but later perished, refusing food or contact. Communication was limited and often futile.” 

Don and Tom developed testimony that suggested one of the creatures, maybe the sole survivor, was seen walking into the base hospital. Personally, I was always somewhat dubious of the claim of a survivor, but now there is a former Pentagon official confirming there was, at least, one survivor. His revelation validates our research, but then, he doesn’t provide any evidence other than what he had been told by an unidentified source.

Tom, Don and I, interviewed several soldiers who saw the alien bodies and we also exposed many of their tales as untrue. As we continued our investigation, we were able to separate the story tellers from those who had real information about the bodies. That number of those telling the truth was quite small.

The point of this commentary is that Stratton’s revelations about the Roswell crash/retrieval were reported by us decades earlier. Our reporting was ignored or attacked because we all knew that alien visitation was not real. There are now those who are reporting the same thing, who have not been ridiculed but they don’t name the names. We did and do so that the sources can be evaluated. I am annoyed that we have been ignored for years, but delighted that what we reported is being confirmed, again, by the alleged insiders. Too bad all this new interest wasn’t made thirty years ago when many of the witnesses we revealed were still alive to confirm their roles in the recovery. So much has been lost to time