Citizen Hearing and Alien Bodies

At the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, Merrill Cook asked a question that, at the time was confusing for those of us facing him and his former congressional buddies. He wanted to know, as near as I can figure now, if anyone who claimed to have seen the bodies of the alien creatures had mentioned it in 1947. We all struggled with this as he kept talking about it and we thought of military men who had seen the bodies but who had said nothing until years later. We didn’t think of anyone who had talked about it in 1947, or how we could expect to find anything about that now?

The committee listening to testimony at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, D.C., May 2013.

Of course, a letter or diary that was written at the time would be one way, but the only diary I have ever found that was reliable was that of Ruth Barnett. There was nothing in it to suggest that Barney Barnett had seen anything unusual in 1947. Stan didn’t mention Gerald Anderson, I suspect because he was flanked by Don and me and he believed we would challenge that. Besides, Anderson had admitted to faking one document when confronted with the evidence of that forgery.

I looked at Don and he looked at me. We both thought of Edwin Easley, the provost marshal, but I had nothing from him to suggest he had talked about the bodies in 1947 to anyone. Sitting beside me was Jesse Marcel, Jr., but according to him, his father had never said anything to him about bodies.

The one person we didn’t think of at the time was Frankie Rowe. For this discussion, it doesn’t matter what you think of her tale, and I don’t really want to hear about Karl Pflock’s “evidence” that she wasn’t telling the truth. We know that some of his evidence has been debunked.

 

Frankie Rowe

Anyway, according to Rowe, her father, a fire fighter with the Roswell Fire Department, told her, and the family, that he had gone out to the crash site, and that he had seen the bodies of the alien creatures. Rowe said that her father described creatures as small and hairless.

 

This would have answered the question for Cook. Someone who, in 1947, talked about the alien creatures. One of the fire fighters, when interviewed several years ago, also mentioned that Dwyer, Rowe’s father, had told him, in 1947, some of what he had seen.

Granted, this is testimony gathered years after the event. Granted, it is all second hand. It does, however, answer the question as posed. Was there anyone who talked of the alien creatures at the time, meaning in 1947? The answer is, “Yes.”

Sometimes, we all get lost in the weeds. Neither Don nor I thought of Frankie Rowe in front of that committee. It would have been nice to have her sitting at the table to say, “Yes, my father told me about them that very night.” It would have been a powerful moment.

One that we lost.

Citizen Hearing and Merrill Cook

When I read that former Congressman Merrill Cook from Utah, one of those at the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, had said, “I do not believe there has been any strong, credible evidence of [alien visits] at this point but I do think there has been some credible evidence of things that are unidentified that had been flying about,” I was disappointed. But then I thought about what he had said and realized that it was quite fair.

 

Merrill Cook

Cook, who asked some very convoluted questions, hadn’t dismissed the idea of alien visitation but had suggested that the strong evidence hadn’t been presented. Of course that was correct. Had there been that sort of physical evidence, then the conversation would have ended at that point and we could move onto the next phase.

 

There were some very persuasive documents presented. In one case from South America, a pilot, Comandante Oscar Santa Maria Huertas (Ret) of the Peruvian Air Force, who had fired on a UFO described the event. He had two pages of an official message about it. It said that he had fired on the UFO without results and I realized that could have meant he missed, so I asked.

 

Using a 30 mm cannon on his SU-22, he had hit the object when he shot at it. The rounds had no effect, and the object seemed to “absorb” the ammunition. Make no mistake, a 30 mm round is huge and explosive.

While I was on the “hot seat” along with Don Schmitt and Stan Friedman, Cook asked if anyone in 1947 had seen the alien bodies, but it wasn’t clear if he wanted to know if someone had discussed it in 1947 or if he wanted to know if someone there in 1947 had seen them. Each time we tried to offer an answer, he seemed to change the question by adding qualifications or modifications to it.

 

The answer was, of course, that none of us were around in 1947 (other than Stan) to gather evidence. However, Dan Dwyer had told family members in 1947 that he had seen the bodies, describing them as small humanoids.

This is the Frankie Rowe tale. She said that her father came home after seeing the crash site and told them of the little men he had seen. Later, Rowe’s sister, Helen Cahill said that sometime around 1960, she asked her father about the story and he told it to her. Does that make Rowe’s report true? No, just answers the question that we do have some testimony for that.

There was also Beverly Bean whose father, Melvin Brown, told her during the first moon landing that the UFOs were real and he had seen the bodies. There is another version of this that suggests he told her sometime later, but the point is that he was apparently saying these things prior to the publication of the Roswell information (and yes, both her sister and her mother have confirmed that Brown said these things, which, again, doesn’t make them true, only that he said them several times over the years).

I mentioned Edwin Easley and what he had said to family members, but, of course, this all came about in the early 1990s.

So, we had the names of people who seemed to have passed word of the bodies in 1947, and the names of people who had been there, in Roswell in 1947, who mentioned bodies to family members at some point after that. We had the answer to the question. We just didn’t articulate it well.

Cook at the Citizen Hearing

We did a poor job of answering the question for Cook and that is our fault. And before I get comments telling me that the testimony is in dispute, that we’re dealing with memories that are now decades old, and that we have some tales that have been disproved, I know all that. The question might have been had any of these people talked about bodies in 1947, and the evidence says that they did… but the proof is not there.

And he had a tendency to cut off an answer and ask another question, or maybe the same question a different way, which added to the confusion. He asked some convoluted question about the American Academy of Sciences and their endorsement of the Condon Committee report. I should have said that they had not engaged in a proper peer review because if they had, they would have noticed that 30% of the cases were unexplained. Worse, if possible, one was explained as a natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since but didn’t identify what that might be.

The real point is that we can prove the cover-up with documentation that has been declassified and documents that are clearly false. How else to explain the Air Force response to Senator Jeff Bingaman when he asked about Project Moon Dust? He was told that such a project never existed. Well it did and continues under another name (and no, I don’t know that name).

So Cook wouldn’t say that we proved to him that we have been visited, but we proved enough that he thought there is credible evidence that something unidentified is flying around. That might be splitting a hair, but I understand what he was thinking when he said that. Besides, he agreed that something unidentified was flying around and that is more than enough.

Had we had more time, had we brought other documents, had we provided more sources for the information, we might have done even better. For now, this is enough. Something unidentified is flying around and shouldn’t we attempt to find out what it is?