New Documentation for Roswell: The Easley Letter

 

As anyone who has been following the Roswell case knows, we, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and I, have been searching for documentation for, literally, decades. We have, of course, all the newspaper articles, the FBI Telex, and one or two hints of something strange falling outside Roswell. We have no diaries, letters, journals or other written statements from the time of the crash that mention the crash. One of the possible exceptions is a magazine article written by Inez Wilcox, wife of the sheriff, that mentions the little men. The problem is that there is no date on it, and the article might have been written after the Roswell crash became prominent in 1978. We need something from 1947.

Don and me on the Impact Site.

We did find a diary that had been kept by Ruth Barnett. Her niece, Alice Knight told me that she had found the diary in a box of material she had received after the death of her aunt. The diary, a daily reminder book for the year 1947, was in there and Ruth used it as a diary. She made entries for the entire year of 1947 and there is no mention of any UFO crash on the Plains of San Agustin.

Stan Friedman, when I met him so that we could copy the diary, suggested that Barney Barnett had been warned about keeping quiet, so he wouldn’t have told Ruth about his adventures over on the Plains. However, according to Vern Maltais, a good friend of Barnett, said that he’d learned of the crash when Barney told him about it at Thanksgiving. That suggests that Barnett wasn’t cowed by the orders to remain quiet, and even if he hadn’t mentioned it in July, he was talking about it in November. There is no notation in the diary about this amazing story that Barney had shared with friends and family during that Thanksgiving get together. There is just nothing said about it until Bill Moore interviewed Barnett’s boss after 1978.

The other document, to surface recently was the alleged diary of Jesse Marcel. This was a standard Army “Memorandum” book that the Army handed out by the hundreds of thousands over the years. I’d had several of them during my military career. Since that book was found in Jesse Marcel’s the possessions, it might have provided a clue about the crash. Unfortunately, once again, there was nothing in it to suggest a crash. To make it worse, handwriting analysis suggested that Marcel had not made the notations in the book.

I have learned in the last several months there was another officer in the office with Marcel. Major Dalton Smith was assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in 1947, and his office number matches that of Marcel. I know nothing much about Smith, other than he was there in 1947 and had the same number. It suggests to me that Smith might be the author of the notations in the Memorandum book. And since the notations aren’t all that personal, when Smith left the 509^th, he left that book behind… Or, when Marcel left, he threw it in box with other items. At any rate, there is nothing of consequence in the book.

The notable one exception to all this was a two-paragraph mention in a Saga magazine article published in the Winter 1974 issue. B. Ann Slate and Stan Friedman, in the article “UFO Battles the Air Force Couldn’t Coverup,” report that Lydia Sleppy had said that her attempt to put the story of the crash over the news wire had been interrupted.  You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/05/lydia-sleppy-1973-interview.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/reports-of-roswell-crash-before-jesse.html

So, we now reach the latest bit of corroboration. I believe that I’m the only researcher to have ever interviewed Major Edwin Easley, the base provost marshal in 1947. He would have been responsible for security at the crash site and on the base. In my interviews, he told me, several times that he couldn’t talk about it because he had been sworn to secrecy. He said that he had promised the president he wouldn’t talk about it.

Skeptics, of course, criticized the statement, wondering if the president would talk to a lowly major. I was of the opinion Easley certainly could have made the promise to an emissary of the president. Both Don and I had learned of several secret service agents who had been dispatched to Roswell in 1947. 

Major Edwin Easley

In a letter dated December 30, 1947, and addressed to Colonel Blanchard, the Roswell base commander, we do have some corroboration for Easley’s help. While the opening paragraph seems to be seasonal boilerplate, meaning it talks about the season and “Your efforts in our behalf repeatedly served to great advantage.”

The second paragraph is the important one. It says, “In these regards, Major Edwin D. Easley, Provost Marshal and his able staff has been particularly helpful. Their intelligent understanding of investigative problems, their devotion and their untiring diligence, regardless of circumstances, had been directly responsible for the successful conclusion of many difficult undertakings.”

The Easley Letter

While this can be viewed as a generic “atta-boy” letter, it is relevant because of the timeframe, 1947, and that I currently know of no other event in which Easley would have been involved in something with the Secret Service. It does underscore Easley’s involvement and helps establish that Easley might well have promised the president that he wouldn’t talk about it by making that promise to the Secret Service representative rather to the president directly. As I have said, this is the latest document relating to the Roswell crash and one of the few that we have.

The Plains of San Agustin Crash Revisited

Since it has been brought up here in the last couple of days, and since we might have beaten the Roswell Slides issue to death, at least for the time being, I thought we might look at the Plains of San Agustin crash scenario once again. Remember, to disagree with me doesn’t make you a liar, just someone with a different opinion. When you don’t bother with searching all aspects of an event, then you become an advocate for that event. I have looked into this case for a long time, and given everything that I have found, I simply cannot shoe horn it into a July 1947 time frame.

You might say that this story begins when Stan Friedman met a couple, Vern and Jean Maltais, in Bemidji, Minnesota, on October 24, 1978. They wanted to tell him of Barney Barnett and a UFO crash that Barnett had told them about many years earlier. He related the tale in his book, Top Secret Majic on pages 18 – 19.

According to Friedman, they were told by Barnett he had found a flying saucer crashed with four bodies lying around it. The military arrived and told Barnett and members of an archaeological team to leave the area. Friedman wrote, “They had no date for the Barnett story.” Please note here that Stan is making this claim about the lack of a date when first told this tale.

Later, however, the date was narrowed down when Vern and Jean Maltais told Bill Moore they visited the Barnetts in February, 1950 (See The Roswell Incident, pages 53 – 58). It was during this visit that Barnett said that he had seen the crashed saucer. Jean Maltais, when asked where the craft had crashed, said, “…I don’t exactly, recall. It was somewhere out of Socorro. He may have said exactly, but I don’t recall. I remember he said it was prairie – ‘the Flats’ is the way he put it… Barney traveled all over New Mexico, but did most of his work directly west of Socorro.”

According to what the Maltais told Moore during his interview with them, Barnett was out on assignment near Magdalena, New Mexico, which is west of Socorro. The story was that Barnett thought at first it was a plane crash but when he got closer, crossing a little more than mile of desert, he saw that it was a saucer-shaped craft, twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter. It was a flash of sunlight from the metallic craft that caught his attention.

Maltais said that Barnett saw some bodies. They were dead, according to what Barnett told Maltais. There were bodies both inside and out, and Barnett said that the ones outside had been tossed out by the impact. He described them as being like humans but they weren’t human. The heads were pair shaped, their arms and legs were skinny, the eyes were small and they had no hair. They were smaller than humans and the heads were larger than those on human bodies.

There were other witnesses there, according to what Maltais heard and what he told me during interviews in August, 1989 and July 1990. These were archaeologists who had been working nearby and apparently had seen the object fall the night before. Barnett seemed to think they were from an eastern university, but Moore reported they were from the University of Pennsylvania. These witnesses have never been located though searches for them have been made.

Not long after Barnett arrived, the military turned up, and took over. They condoned the area and escorted everyone off the site after warning them not to talk about it.

Barnett apparently didn’t keep the secret very long according to others interviewed. In 1947, J. F. “Fleck” Danley was Barnett’s boss. Bill Moore asked Danley about the story. Danley said that Barnett had come into the office one day and said that the flying saucers were real. Danley had been in a bad mood on that day, said that the flying saucers weren’t real and he wasn’t interested in discussing it further. But Danley, thinking about it, felt bad, so he asked him about it sometime later. Danley said Barnett mentioned something about the “Flats” but couldn’t remember much else including when this conversation might have taken place.

Moore returned to the topic four months later and again talked to Danley. At that time Danley said that he remembered the date and was sure that it was sometime early in the summer of 1947. In interviews I conducted with Danley in October 1990 and June 1991, he suggested that he didn’t have a clear memory of when Barnett had told him about the crashed saucer, and in fact, didn’t have a clear idea where Barnett had been on the day he told Danley about the saucer.

Danley mentioned that Barnett was a soil conservation engineer who worked out of Socorro and a satellite office in Magdalena. He did mention that Barnett occasionally made it into Lincoln County, New Mexico but that was rare. Please notice that it was Danley that provided the information that Barnett occasionally got into Lincoln County, in which Corona and the Foster ranch are located. Interestingly, Danley remembered Barnett said something about Carrizozo when he mentioned this in a May 14, 1991 interview. He said that Barnett told him about the crash but he didn’t remember him saying anything about bodies or creatures. Please note that Danley said that Barnett didn’t say a thing about bodies… yes that is redundant, but necessary.

To make this even more complicated, Friedman said that he had “reinterviewed Danley and several others who knew Barney in 1990 [clearly Friedman means he interviewed the people in 1990 and not that they knew Barnett in 1990] and again was told ‘in the Plains.’” Of course, many of those people said “the Flats,” which Friedman, with some justification, translated into the Plains.

These were not the conclusions of others. Jaime Shandera, at the UFO Expo West in Los Angeles on May 11, 1991, was lecturing about the Plains of San Agustin. According to information supplied by Antonio Huneeus and Javier Sierra Shandera had this to say:

The people that supposedly found stuff in Socorro did not find stuff in Socorro. The party of archaeological people and the Barney Barnett part of the story; they were at the Corona site, not in Socorro. I know [this is] the way you understand it because it’s the way it’s always been written and even the way it was written in The Roswell Incident. That’s wrong. There is new evidence that it was all in the Corona site. The way it happened was this – there were not two sites that were more than one hundred miles or so apart … and the so-called Roswell site was just outside of Corona. The archaeologists and Barney Barnett part of it, that was over in Corona. There was no person that found anything in San Agustin.

There were others who talked to Barnett about the case. Stan Friedman interviewed a military reserve officer from New York, William Leed who said that in “the early 1960s,” a fellow officer had told him about Barnett. Leed arranged to go to New Mexico soon after to talk to Barnett about the crash.

Leed did hear the story from Barnett, thought that Barnett was sincere and was impressed that Barnett wouldn’t talk to him until Leed showed him a military ID. Leed made it clear that he was there on a personal quest and this had nothing to do with the military or official business.

There is nowhere in the various interviews with Leed that provide a date or a location. It is assumed that the date is early July, often on the second, and the location is out on the Plains, not far south of Highway 60. Friedman wrote of this meeting between Leed and Barnett, “No reason to think it was other than ‘on the Plains,’ but offers no quotes suggesting that Leed believed this.

In the 1990s, Friedman placed an ad in the Socorro newspaper, asking for anyone who had information about the Barnett story to contact him. One of those who did was Harold Baca who in the 1960s lived across the street from Barnett. He said that as he helped Ruth Barnett take care of an ailing Barnett, he heard about the crashed flying saucer from Barney who was convinced that his cancer was the result of breathing contaminated air near the wrecked saucer and the bodies, at least that is what Baca told me in an interview in June 1991. Baca seemed to think that it had happened “out on the plains.”

Friedman found addition witnesses who suggested that Barnett had said that he was on the Plains. These included the late Marvin Ake, who said he had heard the story “many years earlier, but provided no date and an unidentified and retired postmistress from Datil who said the saucer had been trucked through Magdalena at night. 

Others in the area also remembered discussion of a flying saucer crash on the Plains, but some of them couldn’t remember if they had heard about it in the late 1940s, or sometime after the publication of The Roswell Incident. That was what Johnny Foard told me during an interview on February 9, 1992.

The problem with all this is that Barnett died in 1969 before anyone was talking about flying saucer crashes in New Mexico in 1947 other than mentioning the Aztec case. The interviews are all with people attempting to remember what was said decades earlier and give it some sort of time frame. The contamination of the witnesses can be seen in the evolution of their stories. Vern and Jean Maltais, for example, and according to what Friedman has written, had no date for the story. It wasn’t until later that they seemed to narrow it down and that it could be suggested as July 1947.

The same thing is seen with Fleck Danley. He did not have a time frame or a solid location for the crash until after he had talked to researchers. Other witnesses were vague saying that Barnett had said it was twenty years earlier (Baca) who talked to Barnett about it in 1968 so it provides something of a time frame but one that is still vague.

Then there are people who were on the Plains in July 1947 and said nothing happened. Herbert Dick was one of them. He was excavating the Bat Cave beginning on July 1, 1947, according to a letter I believe was uncovered by Art Campbell in a Harvard archive. The Bat Cave is situated on the eastern side of the Plains with a panorama view from Datil to Horse Springs. If something had fallen and then been recovered in early July 1947, Dick was in a position to see it. We know this because they were excavating the human habitation in the Bat Cave, which means they were near the entrance, and their camp site was on the only flat piece of ground near the cave and facing west. But, according to Dick, they saw nothing.

One other interesting point. In a communication I had with Dick he said that he was not a big fan of the government. If he had seen anything, he wouldn’t keep it a secret. He would tell, but unfortunately, he hadn’t seen anything.

It is for these reasons, that is the lack of first-hand corroboration of the Barnett tale, the inability of the first people to talk of what Barnett said to provide a location and date and that the only source of the information is Barnett that I say, with confidence, that nothing happened there in July 1947.

Anthropomorphic Dummies and the Roswel UFO Crash

Since Tony opened the door again, let’s run through it. We have the Air Force’s second final report on Roswell cleverly titled Roswell — Case Closed which suggests those reporting bodies were fooled by anthropomorphic dummies dropped as tests some ten years later. When first offered, even the colonel holding the press conference seemed to have his tongue planted in his cheek. The reporters didn’t seem to be buying the explanation then and everyone seemed to be having a laugh at this ridiculous suggestion.

Fast forward ten years and now it seems that all those skeptics who didn’t buy the Air Force answer (which is not to say they bought the extraterrestrial answer either) seem to have slipped into the Air Force camp quietly. Now, we are treated to the idea that human memory is fickle and that this "time compression" explanation that was laughed at then, makes sense now.

Well, I’m not going to argue that point because people do confuse events, people do confabulate and some of them just tell lies to thrust themselves into the public spotlight. We don’t have to look far to find them. People claim high military rank to bolster their credibility. They claim to have participated in events that they did not. They claim all sorts of things. And sometimes they just get confused about a sequence of events or the time frame for them with no malice in mind.

But with the Air Force final report, we don’t have to worry about time compression and confusion because we’re stuck with lies. Oh, not from the Air Force officers interviewed because they related what they were doing while working on various projects accurately. We can argue interpretation here, but again that’s not the point. If you want to read a fascinating history of the Air Force Project High Dive, this is the place to do it.

No, I’m going to argue about the witnesses to alien bodies quoted to support the Air Force idea of these people seeing anthropomorphic dummies.

Here’s the rub, of those cited in the report, Gerald Anderson, Glenn Dennis, and Jim Ragsdale, none was involved. Each told an interesting story, but those stories have been discredited. And of those three, Dennis was only relating what had supposedly been told to him by a nurse. He hadn’t seen the bodies himself, just the drawing the nurse made which seems to reflect the Martians from the 1953 War of the Worlds movie, at least in part.

The final two quoted, Vern Maltais and Alice Knight were reporting, accurately I’m sure, what Barney Barnett told them about seeing the alien creatures. It’s clear, however, that Barnett’s tale had little or nothing to do with the 1947 UFO crash. They could only tell us what Barnett had told them.

So, the question becomes, why would the Air Force give any credence to these reports? Why not just say that the stories told were without foundation and let it go at that? Why come out with this idea that anthropomorphic dummies, which looked like what they were and not alien creatures, stand? And finally, how good can your conclusions be if you’ve built your foundation on a phony base?

Here is the conundrum for the Air Force. They wanted to attack the idea that there were bodies so they took testimony from civilians who claimed involvement but who, by the time the Air Force started looking at this, had been exposed.

To make it worse, if possible, they explained Frank Kaufmann’s illustration of what the craft looked like by publishing a picture of "tethered ‘Vee’ balloon" that was taken in 1965, or nearly twenty years after the fact. The problem here is that Kaufmann was making up most of what he said about the construction of the craft so their explanation fails on that point.

The question then is, how does the testimony of those people support the idea of anthropomorphic dummies? If we conclude that these people were in error, in the case of Maltais and Knight, or were inventing their involvement as did Anderson, Dennis and Ragsdale, then isn’t the argument for anthropomorphic dummies eliminated?

And doesn’t all this argue that the Air Force didn’t care for the truth as long as they could confuse the issue in the minds of those who haven’t been paying close attention and keeping score at home? They can say, "Well these people really saw anthropomorphic dummies," when the fact is, they didn’t see anything at all. Any descriptions they offered, if it matched the dummies was purely coincidental. That doesn’t help their case.

Finally, the Air Force stayed away from attacking the testimony of any of the high ranking officers. They were just left out of the mix. I suspect they didn’t want to be calling an Air Force general and a bunch of colonels liars. Use the civilians but don’t mention the Air Force officers.

True, Edwin Easley didn’t describe for me alien bodies but he did say things to family members. Patrick Saunders didn’t mention bodies but did talk of hiding information and suggested aliens to his family. Arthur Exon talked of alien bodies based on information he received from those he knew and trusted.

All this is, of course, now second hand, but the Air Force said nothing about any of these men, didn’t quote anything they said, and pretended they didn’t exist. I’m willing to bet the Air Force might have been afraid that if they attacked the reputations of these men there might have been trouble. Suppose they sued the Air Force for publicly damaging their reputations. Such a court fight would be big news, if only for the topic, and the Air Force would have been required to prove the men were lying... which opens the door to subpoenas and court testimony. That could have gotten ugly in minutes.

Or, they just didn’t want to suggest that they would promote men to high rank who believed they had seen alien bodies or who supported the idea of alien visitation.

Anyway you look at it, the Air Force could have found itself with a nasty, public fight as it tried to prove the men liars or worse and the men demanding information through discovery. The Air Force would have been forced to produce documents or produce evidence that the men were lying. Either way, the Air Force loses.

With the anthropomorphic dummies, the Air Force supplies an answer for questions about alien bodies and they don’t have to go after the Air Force officers. The civilians just made a mistake about the bodies (though Ragsdale talked about 15 bodies, Anderson talked about one of the creatures walking around, and Dennis merely reproduced what the nurse had told him about the bodies... though I don’t believe the Air Force mentioned multiple anthropomorphic bodies being dropped which would render their explanation inadequate, but I digress). And, as an added bonus, they don’t have to label anyone a liar who might turn around and sue them. They were just mistaken in their interpretation of what they had seen. Neat.

Anyone who thinks through this is going to realize that the Air Force explanation is a crock... and if this explanation can’t be believed, then what is the Air Force hiding. If the truth is that nothing extraterrestrial fell at Roswell, then why would the Air Force care what we all think? Why not just ignore the problem because it doesn’t impact them at all... unless there is more to it than meets the eye.