The main crash site at Roswell. More than two dozen civilians saw
military activity at this site. (©1997 Wliilim L. McDonald)

The Roswell Aliens                               Roswell Debris Field

Roswell Eyewitnesses                             Roswell Citizens Threatened

Roswell Timeline 

Tuesday, July 1, 1947

Military installations at White Sands, Alamogordo, and Roswell, New Mexico track high-speed objects on radar, all flying at speeds well above what current jet fighters were capable of doing. With the radar blips penetrating highly secure air space at will, all three facilities go on full alert.

Wednesday, July 2, 1947

Civilians spot disk-shaped craft flying over Roswell. Numerous reports come in from the public. The number of radar blips increase. Now there is almost a constant presence of the unidentified objects showing on radar.

Friday, July 4, 1947

Late at night during a tremendous thunderstorm, a fast-moving object disappears from military radar screens and local citizens hear a loud, unusual explosion and watch an object traveling overhead crash into the desert. Radar operator Steve Arnold watches a blip on the radar screen pulsate, enlarge, and then explode, disappearing from the screen.

Colonel William Blanchard thinks an enemy aircraft has penetrated the defense systems and has crashed nearby. He immediately sends out a team to investigate the crash. Blanchard desperately wants to know what kind of aircraft could make hairpin turns at three thousand miles per hour, which he just had witnessed on the radar screens.

Saturday, July 5, 1947

About 4:00 a.m. the military team reaches the still-smoldering wreckage. They call local sheriff George Wilcox and tell him to send out the fire department.

The Main Crash Site

Among the military team members is Steve Arnold and what he sees amazes him. The craft was still almost completely intact and partially buried in the sand as the result of a terrific impact. By comparison, Arnold feels an airplane would have been completely demolished. The craft appeared to be crescent-shaped, or like a rounded delta shape. Arnold sees several small, dark-gray bodies sprawled on the sand near the craft. He also sees another one near an opening in the craft. Arnold initially thinks it must be some kind of secret Russian craft.

One being is still alive. It tries to run away. Some of the soldiers yell at it to stop running, while at the same time locking rounds into the chambers of their guns. They end up firing on and killing the alien. Immediately after the alien is shot, an officer turns to Arnold and tells him to prevent a group of civilians who have shown up from getting any closer to the craft and bodies.

Fireman Steve Dwyer arrives with the Roswell fire department. He too sees the strange, crashed craft and alien bodies. As one is being carried right by him on a stretcher, Dwyer gets close enough to look down into the alien being' s eyes. Dwyer gets some kind of mental information from the being telling him it knows it is dying.

A number of private citizens report that the downed craft crashed into the side of a ravine, about 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning. These people include:

Dr. W. Curry Holden

An archaeologist from Texas Tech University, he is on a field trip with a group of students. At first Holden thinks it' s a plane and sends one of his student to go call the local sheriff. Holden and the others see three small bodies, two outside the craft and one still inside they can see through a hole in the body of the craft. When the military arrived, the entire group was escorted to the Roswell Army Air Base, where they were detained and told not to talk about the incident.

Later that same day Holden ran into another scientist in Roswell, Dr. C. Bertrand Schultz, a paleontologist who had been working in the area. Holden told Schultz what he had seen. Schultz was impressed enough that he recorded his meeting with Holden in his personal diary. Holden later confirmed in an interview that he had in fact been at the site of the crash. Holden is a credible witness. He had been the Chairman of the Department of History and Anthropology at Texas Tech. Holden died in 1993 at the age of ninety-four.

James Ragsdale

Along with his friend Trudy Truelove, Ragsdale said he saw the craft roar overhead about 11:30 p.m. the night before when they were out camping. They got in their jeep and drove into the desert to find out what crashed. They found the craft stuck in the side of a small hill. It looked very unusual and they thought it was an experimental military craft. They didn' t see any movement in their flashlight beam, so they decided to leave and come back in the morning.

When they went back the next day they could see the craft more clearly. It looked like an airplane with little crescent-shaped wings. The front end was collapsed, but the rear part was intact. They also saw several bodies "about four or five feet long É they looked like midgets." They both picked up pieces of debris. As Ragsdale said, "You could take that stuff and wad it up and it would straighten itself out."

Shortly thereafter the military showed up in force with six or seven trucks and a staff car. Ragsdale and Truelove were afraid they would get in trouble, so they threw down the pieces they had picked up and hid. They stayed hidden while they watched the military completely clear away and pick up every piece of debris and the bodies. Ragsdale said they even raked the ground afterward. Ragsdale' s story has been confirmed by other family members.

Sergeant Thomas Gonzalez

Gonzalez was one of the men assigned to guard the site. In an interview years later he recalled seeing small bodies with eyes not much larger than human eyes and a slightly enlarged head.

Major Edwin Easley

The man in charge of the MPs who were guarding the site during clean-up, Easley said he told his men to surround the ship with their backs to it. He told them not to let anyone come near it unless they had proper clearance.

Steve MacKenzie

He has signed a sworn affidavit stating his experience in the Roswell affair. He had been stationed at Roswell Army Air Base. On July 2, 1947 he was told to report to White Sands where he monitored the fast-moving disks flying over the area. On July 5, while back at Roswell, he was told to go out to the crash site, immediately, along with a special team from Washington.

When they got there MacKenzie said they just stood there staring at the crashed object because they realized it was one of the things they had been tracking on radar and had watched it disappear from the screen. MacKenzie said, "We were all smoking cigarettes and talking about how in the hell we were going to handle this thing. We were all concerned and a little scared." MacKenzie also confirmed that the Army completely cleaned the site, even using vacuum cleaners to complete the job.

MacKenzie personally said he saw four small bodies, one still inside the craft sprawled across a seat. He later learned there was a fifth body at the crash site.

When the military arrives they discover five alien bodies at this, the main-impact site. Melvin E. Brown, a soldier on guard, is told to get inside a truck with the recovered bodies. Although he is told not to, he lifts a tarp covering the bodies and sees them. He later stated that they were small with large heads and odd-colored skin.

"A.K."

Years later in an interview with physicist Stanton Friedman, an Army Air Force photographer who Friedman identifies as A.K. said that in July of 1947 he was stationed at Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington D.C. He also made the following statement:

One morning (in July 1947) they came in and they said, "Pack up your bags and we' ll have the cameras there, ready for you." (They were then flown to Roswell Army Air Base.)

We got in a staff car and we headed out about an hour and a half  we was headin'  north. We got out there and there was a helluva lot of people out there, in a closed tent. All kinds of brass runnin'  around. And, they was tellin'  us what to do; shoot this, shoot that!

There was four bodies I could see when the flash went off. I remember they was thin and looked like they had too big a head.

Someone calls Sheriff George Wilcox in Roswell and tells him about the crash. Wilcox sends out several members of the local fire department to the main crash site. At this point, this is the only crash site that has been reported.

The local mortician in Roswell, Glenn Dennis, receives three phone calls from the Air Base asking him about the availability of small, child-sized coffins. He is also asked about various chemicals and their effects on body tissue. He is then asked about how to prepare a body that has been laying out in the desert.

Dennis also operated the local ambulance service. Later that day he transports an injured soldier to Roswell Army Air Base. While standing around the loading dock in the back of the hospital, he sees a lot of unusual activity. Two military officers, obviously upset at seeing him there, approach him and threaten him. They tell Dennis, "If you open your mouth, we' ll be picking your bones out of the sand."

 Author's Note

In 1998 I had the opportunity to go to Roswell New Mexico and spend a week doing research during the week of the 51st anniversary of the Roswell crash. I spent some time alone with Glenn Dennis and he filled in some details from a personal standpoint that are often overlooked. Here is what he told me:

At he time he received the call from the Army Air Base, he was only 22 years old. His boss was out of the office running an errand. The request for a child-sized casket was extremely unusual and he wanted to make sure  he understood correctly what they were asking for, as he was afraid his boss would chew him out. The request was unusual because this was the most secure  and highly classified air base in the world at the time. Roswell Army Air base was the base that launched the planes that dropped the atomic bombs in World War II, just two years earlier. There were NEVER any children allowed on the base. And, they were asking for multiple child-sized caskets. So Dennis was thinking, was it a school bus accident? And if so, why would they take the kids to the Air Base? He knew that something very unusual was going on when they asked for those caskets. He also confirmed that he did indeed see dead alien bodies. The impact is much greater when you hear the minute detail that can only come from a person that was actually there.

Glenn Dennis as he appeared when I met him in 1998.

Poster from 60th Anniversary of Roswell Alien Crash

 
Roswell Cover-Up

Roswell Photos

Roswell Press Release

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