Important UFO Update
Deathbed affidavit proves all. Report includes actual photo of what a real alien might look like. Authenticity of report enhanced by lack of byline, lack of quotes, lack of details about when and where Haut died, or who released the affidavit.
Lieutenant Walter Haut was the public relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard.
Haut died last year but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death.
Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar.
He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.
(WELCOME Daily Grail readers. I don’t know who you are or what you want with my kind. Just please, limit all probing to the verbal kind. Otherwise, feel free to look around. We’re trying to sort a couple of things out. World’s oldest profession or quaint pastime? Assault on civil liberties or common sense? International wrongfulness or Islamic terrorism? Meanwhile, there’s a summer spectacular in the works.)
OK, back to the matter at hand: As a highly trained professional tabloid journalistic investigative technician, I was dispatched to Roswell, N.M., in 1997 to conduct a thorough examination of the events there. I encountered a fascinating labyrinth of mystery, in which concentric rings of obfuscation are enigmatically riddled with hype. Based on what I was able to determine, I can state without reservation that something very unusual took place at Roswell over the past 60 years:
THE ROSWELL INCIDENT: What really happened at Roswell?
Jules Crittenden
29 June 1997
ROSWELL, N.M. - The wrecked spacecraft was embedded in the arroyo wall, its side split open, with one alien body hanging out and another lying on the ground.
It cast an eerie orange glow high into the desert sky.
That’s how Frank Kaufman tells it, and he says the image still haunts his dreams.
“I was awestruck, looking at it,” said Kaufman, now 81, who claims he was a civilian investigator for the Air Force in July 1947 when he was called out to view the wreckage 22 miles north of this dusty desert town.
“It didn’t look like a plane, and it didn’t look like a missile. We were just dumbfounded. It looked more like one of those Stealth bombers,” he said.
“The bodies weren’t mangled at all. They were good-looking people. The eyes were a little larger. The head was larger. They were ash-colored. But it’s not that exaggerated alien look you see. That’s a joke.”
Military police cordoned off the area while trucks hauled the wreckage and bodies back to Roswell Army Air Field.
“The one objective was to clear it out before daylight, before the curiosity seekers showed up,” he said. “That was one thing we didn’t want.”
This week, the faithful are gathering in Roswell, paying homage at this place where they say something otherworldly fell out of the sky 50 years ago. Up to 10,000 people a day are expected for UFO Encounter ‘97, a five-day anniversary bash.
But skeptics say it’s garbage - the object that plummeted in the summer of 1947 was a weather balloon. They say the UFO myth is a tall tale that mushroomed out of control, fueled by charlatans.
The accepted facts are that on July 6, 1947, a ranch hand named Mac Brazel drove into town with some unusual metallic material.
Maj. Jesse Marcel went to investigate. On July 8, Lt. Walter Haut acted on Col. William Blanchard’s order to tell reporters a “flying disk” had been recovered.
“RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region,” the Roswell Daily Record trumpeted that afternoon. There was no mention of bodies.
The next day, an Air Force general retracted the report, saying the UFO was a weather balloon. The material disappeared, and the story died until 1980, when UFO researchers met Marcel. He still insisted the material was of alien origin.
Since then, Roswell has grown in the popular imagination, fueled by a rash of books, an “Unsolved Mysteries” episode and references in TV programs like “The X-Files” and movies like “Independence Day.” For believers, the Air Force denials only confirm the coverup.
Marcel and Blanchard are dead. But Haut, 75, said he believes Blanchard’s first report. “The people involved in this were not idiots. They were not prone to seeking notoriety,” he said last week.
Robert Shirkey, 74, was a young lieutenant in the base operations office, he said, when he saw several airmen carrying boxes out to a B-29 bomber.
“They were as close as you to me, and they were carrying boxes full of metal. This was not the metal of our airplanes.”
He saw a short section of I-beam. “It had all these funny marks, like hieroglyphics.”
Retired Gen. Arthur Exon, 82, said he served in New Mexico on secret research projects in the late 1940s, and knew officers with high-security clearances who said they handled material they believed to be of extraterrestial origin, and transported sealed cases they believed contained mortuary remains.
“These are people who would have no reason to make this kind of thing up,” he said.
The military men said they kept quiet for 40 years, respecting Air Force denials until the truth leaked out. Other witnesses emerged - such as a mortician who said he was ordered to take children’s caskets to the airbase, where a distraught nurse described the alien bodies to him.
“The strongest point of it is the military people we’ve spoken to, who speak in terms of a real event,” said UFO investigator Kevin Randle, 48, a former Air Force intelligence officer. He said he has interviewed about four dozen “credible” people who saw debris, and perhaps a dozen who say they saw alien bodies.
“These are people who attained high military rank, who have nothing to gain by this story,” Randle said. “The weakest point is the lack of physical evidence. Also, the hangers-on who introduce whopping changes in the story. It paints the whole thing as a hoax.”
But UFO Investigator Karl Pflock, a former CIA agent and deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration, says even seemingly credible military witnesses are flawed.
“I believe UFOs are real. But I don’t think that’s what fell on Roswell,” he said. “We’re talking about scuttlebutt, remembered over 50 years. To me it is almost useless.”
Pflock is more critical of Kaufman, saying military records show he was a personnel sergeant until 1945 and there is no evidence he worked for the Air Force as a civilian.
“I think Frank Kaufman is a lonely old guy who is having a good time. He’s obviously a guy who loves to tell tall tales.”
Kaufman says he doesn’t have a high opinion of Pflock’s investigative skills, either. He insists his “personnel” designation was a cover and his civilian role remains top secret.
“I wish I never did get involved in this. You dream about it. You think about it. At times it is disturbing,” Kaufman said.
Meanwhile, Pflock said descriptions of the UFO material matches that used in radar reflectors in Project Mogul, which launched balloons in New Mexico in 1947. What looked like hieroglyphs, he said, was a purplish floral design on tape used by a toy manufacturer who was hired to make the reflectors.
Pflock cites declassified Air Force memos from the period.
“We have absolutely no reference to Roswell. We have documents lamenting the lack of physical evidence of UFOs. These are top-secret documents between the men responsible for dealing with UFOs. To me, that’s the end of Roswell.”
Ray Fowler of Wenham, Mass., a Mutual UFO Network investigator, takes a hands-off attitude toward Roswell.
“If you go into Roswell saying you believe it happened, you can find good evidence to support your belief,” he said. “But if you believe those things can’t happen, you can look at all the contradictions and make a case that it didn’t happen.”
THE ROSWELL INCIDENT: Pay your respects, plus $15
Jules Crittenden
29 June 1997
ROSWELL, N.M. - At UFO Ground Zero, four 20-foot-tall red sandstone megaliths rise out of the desert floor like a modern American Stonehenge.
A somber inscription carved in “alien”-style letters declares this a “universal sacred site” dedicated “to the beings who met their destinies near Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947.”
“We’ve had people bring flowers and leave them here. People cry at the site,” said Sheila Corn, 33, a rancher’s wife who uses a ‘97 GMC Suburban with the personalized plate “I BELIVE” to drive across the 24-square-mile property.
“Hub and I felt like we needed a memorial here. Something died here,” she said.
It’s a place dotted with mesquite and stunted cacti, frequented by rattlesnakes, buzzards, dust devils and carloads of UFO believers. The only unearthly object in sight is the scorching sun overhead.
The low butte the flying saucer slammed into shows no more scarring than any other part of this arid, broken country. Only faith and the word of a handful of witnesses attest to this as the place where five alien astronauts crashed and burned.
“We’ve had a couple universities out here. They haven’t found anything,” Corn said.
But witnesses and thousands of others have given it the nod.
“Why would someone come all the way out here to tell a lie?” Corn said.
Hub and Sheila Corn charge $15 a head to escort visitors eight miles up a dirt track and through a locked gate to the site.
“We didn’t know anything about this site until 1994,” she said. “When the UFO museum people told us, we laughed. We thought, yeah, right. But all these people were coming. We were forced to do something.”
Like any place of sacred myth, the Corn ranch has contenders. Some UFO advocates have abandoned it in favor of a site 70 miles east where Jim Ragsdale, a local resident now deceased, told investigators he was in his girlfriend’s embrace in the back of his pickup truck when he saw a UFO fly overhead and crash nearby.
“The Corn site has been discredited,” said Glenn Dennis, president of the International UFO Museum. “We have affidavits from the McKnight family that used to own that land that nothing ever happened there.”
Meanwhile, Corn says, “We heard that people are selling little bottles of dirt from the UFO crash site. They didn’t get it from here.”
THE ROSWELL INCIDENT: In Roswell, N.M., it’s all aliens all the time
Jules Crittenden
30 June 1997
ROSWELL, N.M. - The city fathers here are shameless opportunists, and they don’t mind telling you about it.
“I saw a window of opportunity and we jumped through it,” said a grinning Mayor Tom Jennings, 46, a former oil-and-gas land speculator who is now peddling Roswell’s UFO legend to an alien-happy America. “Some people think I’m goofy, but how do you argue with success?”
This week, up to 10,000 UFO enthusiasts a day will roll into town to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the highly questionable account of a flying saucer crash that left five dead aliens in the desert outside town.
UFO Encounter ‘97, which starts tomorrow, will feature UFOlogists such as Harvard’s alien abduction scholar John Mack and Chariots of the Gods writer Erich Von Daniken; a UFO film festival; and an alien costume contest, the 5K “Alien Chase” roadrace, and a flying-saucer soapbox derby. Jennings’ office is festooned with Roswell-abilia - big-headed alien dolls; boxes of Roswell UFO Mini-Cookies; Glow-Pops, “glowing where no pop has glowed before”; and dozens of other bits of promotional schlock. He has framed the national magazine articles - Forbes, Penthouse and TIME - that herald his accomplishment. “You can’t buy this kind of publicity,” he said. “We have made Roswell a tourist destination.”
This week, up to 400 reporters from as far away as Korea and Israel are in town, recording the alien hype and the straight-faced accounts of UFO witnesses.
“This place is like a mental hospital,” said one disgusted Norwegian TV man. “Have you spoken to these people? They say the government is covering this up because it will ruin the oil industry. They talk about the Rockefellers. You find exactly the same arguments here as the militia movement.”
Two UFO museums offer up versions of the tale, with papier-mache dioramas depicting the carnage of the alien crash site. At the International UFO museum, Glenn Dennis, 72, the mortician who says he was ordered to bring child-sized coffins to the local Air Force base in 1947, wanders among the curious.
“A nurse at the air base drew me a drawing of the alien bodies. She was crying and pulling her hair out,” Dennis told onlookers. “I have never repeated her name. I don’t know where she is today, but I have always honored that promise.”
Ann Mitchell, 31, a nurse from Spokane, Wash., studied the exhibits intently.
“This is a chance to be in the middle of an American mystery,” she said. “I was concerned I’d see more of the coverup, but it’s more facts.”
“Something definitely happened here,” said John Price of the UFO Enigma Museum, a UFO promotional pioneer.
“I opened this place in 1988 to make a stand that something did happen here. There are so many ignorant people out here who don’t want to believe it.”
Neither museum charges admission, but they take donations and charge anywhere up $25 for alien-motif hats, T-shirts, mugs and trinkets. Small crashsite models go for up to $40.
Adrean’s Wedding Gallery has an alien mannequin in a lacy bridal gown with a full train.
“If you’re a Main Street merchant, it’s important to take part in the fun,” said Adrean Spencer.
But behind the counter at Walgreen’s, clerk Mario Maguire is sick of the UFO hoopla.
“What are they expecting to see in Roswell? I’ve lived here my entire life, and I’ve never seen anything,” said Maguire, 32. “They’re selling crash-site dirt. They’re selling bottles of Roswell water, and it’s some of the worst you ever tasted.”
Kathy Jordan, 38, a local loan officer, joked, “I’m considering selling some dirt myself. I’ve got 2 1/2 acres south of town.
“Lived here my entire life and never gave a moment’s thought to it,” Jordan said about the Roswell Incident. “But I’ve never doubted it. I was in the Navy for eight years. Government coverup? I don’t doubt it for a minute.”
Space cadets descend upon UFO festival
Jules Crittenden
7 July 1997
By the thousands, they beamed down this weekend to Roswell, N.M. - star-crazed wackos, obsessive Trekkies, techno-nerds, earnest UFOlogists and curious tourists.
Many were fervent believers in aliens. Some believed they had been abducted by aliens. And a few, mingling with the crowds at UFO Encounter ‘97 last week, actually said they werealiens.
“April sees things differently from other people of her age. She was brought up to know she was an alien,” said Janet Morgan of New Orleans, pointing to her 20-year-old daughter, who was dressed in a black lycra bodysuit and was trying to sell an alien “bible” to a passer-by.
Morgan said she, her husband and their five children are all aliens and that many people on Earth have extraterrestrial genes.
Janet Harris, a 38-year-old clerk from New York, was in Roswell to share her own ET experiences. She claims she was abducted four times as a teenager and twice more in 1994.
“People refuse to believe it because it scares them, but the aliens are not coming to do us harm, they are going to help us,” Harris said.
“It’s part carnival and part folk festival. Also a bit of an old-time camp meeting,” said Benson Saler, a Brandeis University anthropologist who was there to study this subculture.
At an occasion such as this, appropriate attire was required, of course.
“There is a very attractive young woman who is wearing very skimpy clothes, but she’s completely covered in silver paint,” Saler said. “But most people are dressed as summer tourists, as if they were on Cape Cod. This is a very well-mannered crowd.”
“People are having a good time,” said silver-painted Morgianna, an “intergalactic belly dancer” from New Mexico. She said she has incorporated the design of alien hieroglyphics into the movements of her belly in her new routine.
Don Thomas of Boston wore a silver UFO hat up with a digital watch, blinking lights and a gyroscope.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it is,” Thomas said. “It just came down and landed on my head this morning.”
Dozens of UFO pilgrims were camped out at the crash site, looking up at the vast sky in hopes of spotting the grieving aliens who might return to pay tribute to their brethren, lost that fateful day 50 years ago.
UFO lore holds that on or about the night of July 4, 1947, an extraterrestrial space pod slammed into the desert north of town. Five alien crewmen, killed in the crash, were then taken away for top-secret tests by the U.S. Air Force.
Last week, a small group of UFO researchers announced they had finally located a rock-like silicon piece of the alleged craft and had over the last 18 months proven with isotopic ratio tests that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
“This is one of the most extraordinary discoveries of our time,” researcher Paul Davids said.
But he and the other UFOlogists did not display the sample and declined to where they got it.
Topics: UFOs, military, science, shameless opportunism
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:23 am on Sunday, July 1, 2007
4 Responses to “Important UFO Update”
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July 1st, 2007 at 9:47 am
Gee, maybe I’ll go over for the “festivities”.
When you’re in Roswell at the time of this money making hype (uh, festival), it feels like a scam.
Little known the 2nd crash at roughly the same time (1947) some 100 miles south of Albuquerque and slightly west. Keep going on that same road and you’ll run into the VLA, very large array (think Jodie Foster).
July 1st, 2007 at 9:53 am
Roswell was the test site for the first batch of LSD ever made.
July 1st, 2007 at 10:37 am
Ah, the UFO craze! It’s amazing how people take what amounts to “First Contact” with an alien civilization, and make a few bucks off of it.
For the life of me, I can’t tell if I’m boggled by the naivity of people, or impressed by their ability to squeeze the marks dry.
July 1st, 2007 at 1:55 pm
True story: one night in the late 80’s (I’ll never be able to remember the date), while we were living in Michigan, I got up at 1AM to let my dogs out. It was a nice clear night, so I stepped out to look at the stars. It was the strangest thing. The stars were wavering — not twinkling — as if I were viewing them from under water. If it was a weather phenomenon, like say a moving mass of air, it was the fastest moving mass of air ever, and I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. What made it spookier is, my dogs came running into the house at top speed without making a sound.
The next day, some other woman in town called the police to say she’d seen a UFO at 1AM.
I don’t know. Unusual weather phenomenon? UFO? You decide.