'Witness to Roswell'

A Review of Tom Carey & Don Schmitt's New Book

by David Rudiak

 

Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt's new book, "Witness to Roswell" just came out, which I just received from Amazon.com. As the name attests, the book focuses on witness testimony, and Carey and Schmitt have a slew of new witnesses to report, including a few first-hand accounts of seeing the alien bodies. There are also a ton of second-hand alien body stories, plus a few to seeing the spacecraft either out at the crash site or in the Hangar 84/P-3 at the base.

The hangar is the focus of many of the accounts, seemingly being the centralized collection point for the debris, craft, and bodies for further processing and transport out of the base. The number of reports on alien bodies was surprising to me, including several of a live alien. I had no idea there was so much testimony along these lines.

The prize witness is Walter Haut, as most of us know, the Roswell base public information officer, who put out Colonel Blanchard's recovered flying disc press release on July 8, 1947. Haut in 2002 filled out a notarized affidavit, to be sealed until after his death. Here the affidavit is revealed in full. Haut, as he first did in an oral history with Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthaser in 2000, reveals seeing the crash object and several small bodies with big heads at Hangar 84, after being taken there by Col. Blanchard. This was on Tuesday, July 8 in the afternoon, after the press release had hit the wires.

Haut also reveals first hearing about the Brazel debris field and another crash location 40 miles to the north, where the main craft and bodies were, on Monday afternoon, July 7, after returning to the base from home after the 4th of July weekend. The northern site had just been found by civilians and rumors of the two sites were beginning to break out in town and on the base.

The following morning at 7:30, Haut attended the senior staff morning meeting where everybody was briefed as to what was happening. Marcel and Cavitt described their findings at the Brazel debris field and Blanchard filled in everybody on the second crash site. Haut also states Gen. Ramey and Col. Dubose were there, meaning they had flown in from Fort Worth. Debris was passed around for everybody to handle and nobody could identify it. Much of the meeting was devoted to discussing how to handle the situation and what the public should be told. Here Haut discusses some of the rationale behind the issuing of the puzzling press release. According to Haut, it was Gen. Ramey's idea to divert public attention away from the closer and more important craft/body site. Haut felt Ramey was just carrying out orders from the Pentagon.

PFC Rolland Menagh was another MP at the site, according to sons Michael and Rolland Jr. He described the ship as egg-shaped and seamless. Michael recalled him describing three dead bodies. His father said they loaded the ship onto an 18-wheeler and covered it with a tarp. He escorted it in a jeep as they drove it through the center of town to the base and deposited it in a hangar.

Haut also states he went out to at least one of the sites and brought back some debris of his own. He was aware of two teams that went out for months afterwards to try to uncover any physical evidence that might have been left behind. Although he doesn't say it, Haut is here providing some corroboration for various tales of debris confiscation afterwards, such as told by Bill Brazel Jr.

Haut's affidavit plus other testimony below revives the crash site 40 miles of north of Roswell where the main craft and bodies were found. Haut also presents a new timeline of the discovery of the site on July 7, which means recovery began at this site at the same time Marcel and Cavitt were out at the Brazel debris field investigating it.

Another prize eyewitness is Sgt. Frederick Benthal. He was F.B. in "Crash at Corona", but here he is identified publicly for the first time. Benthal was the Army photographer flown in from Washington, taken out to the body site, and who photographed the alien bodies in a tent, with everybody else cleared out. Corroborating this was a first/second-hand account from an MP at the site, PFC Ed Sain. He stated he was taken out to the site in one of the ambulances and ordered to shoot anybody who tried to enter a particular tent. His son said his father didn't like to talk about it, but had told him he had guarded the bodies in the tent until they were transported to the base.

Sain indicated that another MP, Cpl. Raymond Van Why, had gone out with him to the site. Van Why's widow, Leola, said her husband first talked about it in 1954 when he got out of the service. He told her that he had been a guard at a crash site and had seen the round spacecraft.

Sgt. Homer Rowlette was with the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron. His son Larry and daughter Carlene Green said he told them about it on his deathbed in March 1988. He was part of the cleanup detail sent to the impact site north of Roswell.

He handled the infamous "memory foil" described by many others. He described the ship as "somewhat circular" and said he had seen "three little people" with large heads. At least one was alive (just one of the "live alien" stories).

This brings us back to Roswell base, S. Sgt. Earl Fulford saw his close friend, S. Sgt. George Houck, drive off at 5:00 a.m. July 8 in a low-boy truck, which he presumed was to pick up some wreckage, one of his standard duties. Fulford was an aircraft mechanic who often worked at Hangar 84. During the day civilian mechanics from town kept questioning him about the rumored spaceship with little spacemen. At 4:00 p.m. as he left duty, Fulford saw Houck returning towing a lowboy trailer and carrying a tarped object about the size and shape of a VW Beetle. Houck refused to tell him what was under the tarp, saying he had been ordered not to say. When Fulford tried to get him to talk in the present-day, Houck still refused to talk about it.

There was even more to Fulford's story. The next day he said he was "volunteered" to be part of a work detail of 15-20 men taken out to what we call the Brazel debris field to finish cleaning it up. They were given burlap bags and ordered to pick up anything "not natural." He described an area hundreds of yards in extent and, like other witnesses, said it was ringed with MPs. He said it had obviously been cleaned up before, because there wasn't much left, and he could see tire tracks from big trucks that had been there hauling things away. He said he found only 7 pieces, and described picking up and handling, like so many other witnesses, the "memory foil" that returned to its original shape. When he got back to the base, he was awakened at 2:00 a.m. the next morning at ordered out to Hangar P-3. He was also a forklift operator and was ordered to load a wooden crate, 7 feet square, into an idling C-54. It handled as if whatever was inside weighed very little.

Back at Roswell base, everything centers on Hangar 84/P-3. Another eyewitness MP, PFC Elias Benjamin, described being ordered to pick up his gun and go out to Hangar P-3 for guard duty on the morning of July 8. He noticed unusually heavy activity around base headquarters. When he got to the hangar, the officer who had ordered him there was being subdued by MPs. He later found out he had been to the crash site, but when he saw the bodies at the hangar he had flipped out. Benjamin said he was placed in charge of escorting 3 or 4 bodies covered with sheets to the base hospital. One of them appeared to be moving. One of the sheets slipped and he saw a grayish face and large hairless head of something that wasn't human. When he got to the hospital and the sheets were removed, he got a much better view of one of the bodies and gave a familiar description of small body, large egg-shaped head, slanted eyes, slit mouth, and two holes for a nose. He thought it was alive and saw the doctors working on it.

Afterwards, he was debriefed, forced to sign a nondisclosure statement, and told if he ever talked about it very bad things would happen to him and his family. He still feared he would lose his pension. His wife, who encouraged him to go public, said he first told her the story in 1949 when they were married.

At the hospital, Miriam "Andrea" Bush, 27, was a secretary to the hospital administrator Lt. Col. Harold Warne. According to her brother George and sister Jean, she came home one night in a state of total shock. Finally she said that there were a lot of strange medical personnel at the hospital she didn't recognize. Later Warne would take her to an examination room and she saw several small childlike bodies. One was moving. (Another live alien story) Their skin was greyish to brown and they were covered in something like white linens. Their heads and eyes were large. The next day she came home and said nobody was ever to say anything further about it. The family thought she had been very heavily threatened. They said the event so traumatized her that it ruined her life. She died under suspicious circumstances in 1989, with bruises covering her arms, but ruled a suicide by suffocating herself with plastic bag tied round her head.
It is conceivable that mortician Glenn Dennis' "Nurse X" is based in part on Miriam Bush, who would have been about the right age and physical description.

There are several more MPs described guarding the hangar, to go along with some previous accounts, such as from Sgt. Melvin Brown. Pvt. Francis Cassidy told his wife, Sarah Mounce, of seeing the bodies inside. Wanda Lida said her husband, Cpl. Robert J. Lida, said he guarded the hangar and observed wreckage and small bodies inside being prepared for shipment.

Several more witnesses to the heavily guarded B-29 crate flight from Roswell to Fort Worth are provided. We already knew about Robert Slusher and "Tim", here publicly identified as Lloyd Thompson. One, S. Sgt. Arthur Osepchook, like the other men, was sure something very important was inside the crate.

One interesting statement of his is that when they got back to Roswell they were debriefed and told there were no such things as flying saucers and that a crash of one didn't happen. Two MPs described how they had guarded the plane as it was being loaded over the bomb pit. One described how the pit was wrapped with a double layer of fabric to prevent anyone from seeing in. He had to patrol blind between the inner and outer layer of cloth.

Perhaps the most interesting new B-29 flight account came from Blanche Wahnee, daughter of Capt. Meyers Wahnee. She said her father told the family that the Roswell Incident was true in the last year of his life. A high-level security officer, he was flown in from Fort Simmons in Colorado to Roswell to oversee the transport of a "Top Secret item" from Roswell to Fort Worth on a special B-29 flight. The item was a single, large, wooden crate that Wahnee was to accompany as a security guard in the bomb bay. He said it contained the alien bodies recovered near Roswell. As did a few other witnesses in the book, he also said there were three sites.
Three sites? Well of course the Brazel debris field, the body/craft site north of Roswell described by Haut and other witnesses, but what was the third site? According to Carey and Schmitt, this was yet another body site near the Brazel debris field. The evidence for this is thinner. There is the Frank Joyce story of Brazel coming to town in a highly stressed state and describing very smelly nonhuman bodies to him in addition to the large debris field. They also mention young Dee Proctor, who the Proctor family said was with Brazel when he made his debris field discovery, but also reported he had seen something else that had severely traumatized him. He never said exactly what it was, but he took his mother Loretta to the spot in the 1994 when he thought she might be dying.

C & S say the story of the Brazel debris field had already circulated widely in the Corona area and many ranchers and rancher kids already knew about it before Brazel reported it. One of these kids was Sydney "Jack" Wright. He told them that he and two other rancher children had gotten there too. They finally got him to state that, "There were bodies, small bodies with big heads and eyes. And Mack was there too. We couldn't get away from there fast enough."

Another perhaps related account came from the widow of Sgt. LeRoy Wallace, another MP. She said he was called away one evening to go to a crash site outside of Corona "to help load the bodies." When he returned home the next morning, he had a horrible stench on his clothes. She burned the clothes but the horrible smell lingered on his body for another two weeks.

Carey and Schmitt feel that under the circumstances, Jesse Marcel must have seen the bodies too when Brazel took them back to the ranch and debris field. They cite two witnesses who said Marcel did briefly mention seeing the bodies, one a relative, Sue Marcel Methane, who said he told her shortly before he died in 1986. Another was Tech Sergeant Hershel Grice, a ground maintenance crew chief, but who also was a member of Marcel's intelligence team. Grice described Marcel as a "straight arrow." (Haut described him to me this way also.) Grice said Marcel described the bodies as "white, rubbery figures."

There are numerous other witness accounts presented in the book, some already well-known in the Roswell literature, some new. I've covered most of the major new ones here.

One of the more interesting remaining ones came from four sons of Lt. Col. Marion M. Magruder, a legendary WWII Marine aviation commander. According to them, on his deathbed, he confessed to seeing crash wreckage and a live alien at Wright Field two weeks after the incident in mid to late July 1947. He had just started Air War College at Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama, attended by elite high officers who the various services considered to be the future military leaders. They were flown up to Wright Field to get their opinion on an urgent matter. They were then told about the recovery of an extraterrestrial spaceship that had crashed near Roswell, examined wreckage, and then were led to another room and shown a surviving alien. Mike Magruder said his father described the "creature" as under 5 feet tall, "human-like" but with longer arms, larger eyes, and an oversized, hairless head. It had a slit for a mouth and two holes but no appendages for a nose and ears-the standard "grey" description. There was no question in his mind that it "came from another planet."
A number of other military witness accounts center around rumors running rampant at the base of the flying saucer and bodies, of something very big going on, a lot of security, severe warnings to keep their mouths shut, and the base being in lockdown. Some examples were other members of the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron that witness Fulford was in.

PFC Eugene C. Helnes:

"It was definitely not a balloon. ...I know fellows who were out at the site to clean it up. All the talk was of a crashed saucer-right up to the time that I left the base in mid-1949."

Sgt. Harvie L. Davis:

"Stories were going around, and I don't doubt the people involved. I believe that it was a UFO." John Bunch: "Everything was hush-hush. We all knew something was going on, but we didn't know what. A lot of planes were coming in and going out, and the airstrip was shut down for a period. The base went into lockdown, and they checked us real close going in and out."

So there you have it, a whole bunch of witness stories to chew over, including various live alien ones. The description of the main crash object is different here, having changed from a heal-shaped or bat-wing shape into an egg-shape from several witnesses, and also appearing to be a little smaller than previously described. Haut, e.g., in his affidavit described it as about 15 feet long, and Fulford described the tarped object on the truck as about the size of a VW Beetle. Alien body descriptions are impressive in their consistency: large heads, large eyes, small bodies, slit for mouths, two holes for nose and ears, usually greyish or brownish.

I am also very impressed with the consistency of the accounts as they often neatly fit together into a cross-corroborating narrative of what happened, which I've tried to indicate in the presentation of the various witness accounts. It is also hard not to be impressed with the shear numbers of witnesses that have been compiled. Can all of them be lying? Would a Mogul balloon cause this?

I have some quibbles about the organization and writing up of some accounts in the book. Tables summarizing witnesses would have been very useful. There are very large numbers of them to keep track of and they are often scattered throughout the book.

However, in general this is a very impressive body of testimony that Carey and Schmitt have collected and has given me a lot of things to think about.