EXTRATERRESTRIAL BIOLOGICAL ENTITIES
But it wasn’t just metal that had arrived at Wright Field. As they reconstructed the unknown craft’s trajectory, military investigators concluded it had come in from the southeast (in other words, from the Roswell area). Two and a half miles southeast of the debris field, looking down from a reconnaissance aircraft, searchers spotted a second, smaller, relatively more intact though undeniably crashed, machine. Sprawled near it were four bodies. They were not the bodies of human beings.
This aspect of the Roswell story is the most fantastic, unbelievable, and difficult to document. The Air Force went to extraordinary lengths to hide it even from some of those who participated in the recovery of the material at the first site. Yet from the meticulous (and ongoing) research of Schmitt and Randle, we get the testimony of credible individuals who were involved, directly or indirectly, with the recovery of extraterrestrial remains. According to Exon, who heard the story from Wright personnel who had examined the bodies at the base, “they were all found … in fairly good condition,” even though they had lain there for six days (they were discovered on July 8) and varmints had chewed on some of the soft
organs.
Those who participated in the recovery of the bodies have provided consistent descriptions of what these “extraterrestrial biological entities” (the official designation, according to some unconfirmed accounts) looked like. They were four to five feet tall, humanoid, with big heads, large eyes, and slitlike mouths. They were thin and had long arms with four fingers. An Army nurse who worked on the initial autopsy at Roswell remarked on how fragile the skull and bones were. Within hours the bodies were put into large sealed wooden crates, loaded into the bomb pit of a B-29, and flown to Fort Worth Army Air Field. From there they went almost immediately to Wright Field.
Participants kept silent for years. Finally, as initial reports of the Roswell incident began to appear in the 1980s, they began to confide to close friends or family members what they had seen. Even then they were uneasy, still afraid of getting into trouble. One participant, Capt. Oliver (“Pappy”) Henderson, flew the plane that first spotted the bodies. Apparently, judging from what he told his family, he also saw the bodies up close. Sgt. Melvin Brown rode in a truck with the bodies from the crash site to Roswell Field, then stood guard at the hangar where they were first stored.
Several persons who were at Wright Field or who knew individuals who were have testified to the arrival of wreckage and bodies at Wright in July 1947. One of these, retired Gen. Exon, says a top-secret committee was formed to oversee the investigation of this and other highly classified UFO incidents. Nearly 20 years later, when he took command of the base, the committee was still operating. It had nothing to do with Project Blue Book, the poorly funded, inadequate project that apparently served little more than a public relations function. As Brig. Gen.
Bolender had indicated in the internal Air Force memorandum quoted earlier (see Chapter 2 “UFOs: The Official Story”), UFO reports “which could affect national security … are not part of the Blue Book system.”
Echoes of the Roswell incident have been heard for decades in popular folklore about secret rooms and buildings at Wright-Patterson AFB where government personnel study physical and biological proof of alien visitation.
Most—but not all—are “friend-of-a-friend” tales. Retired Wright-Patterson employee Norma Gardner claimed before her death (“Uncle Sam can’t do anything to me once I’m in my grave.”) to have catalogued UFO material, including parts from the interior of a machine that had been brought to the base some years earlier. She also said she had typed autopsy reports on the bodies of occupants; once, moreover, she saw two of the bodies as they were being moved from one location to another. From her description—if she was telling the truth—she saw the Roswell entities. In the mid-1960s Sen. Barry Goldwater, a brigadier general in the Air Force reserve, asked his friend Gen. Curtis LeMay about the rumors. Goldwater told The New Yorker (April 25, 1988) that LeMay gave him “holy hell” and warned him never to bring up the subject again.