Roswell Revisited

A number of years ago I believed that I had interviewed more than a half dozen people who had seen the bodies of the alien creatures killed in the Roswell UFO crash. These were men who claimed to have first-hand knowledge, had been stationed in Roswell at the time, or who lived in Roswell at the time, and who seemed to be telling me the truth. One by one I learned that they hadn’t seen alien bodies and their stories, while quite exciting, were not based in reality. They had been less than candid in their responses to my questions.

That seemed to set the investigation back to its original point, meaning we had only the testimony of those who had seen the strange metallic debris, who had walked the Debris Field on the Foster Ranch, or had seen something in the air that might have been the craft just prior to the crash. While that is enough to get us started with the investigation again, it certainly doesn’t take us to the extraterrestrial. But today, we have new testimony from witnesses who seem to be more honest, suggesting alien creatures were killed and their bodies were recovered. Some of that testimony is second hand, but it does provide us with a glimpse of what those creatures might have looked like and what the situation in Roswell might have been in July 1947. In reviewing this testimony, we must keep in mind that it is second hand.

Anne Robbins

One of the latest of these second-hand witnesses to talk about this was Anne Robbins whose husband T/SGT Ernest Robert Robbins told her about his brush with the alien creatures near Roswell when he was stationed there with the Army. Robbins, according to what his wife said, never talked much about the incident, but did provide some information.

They had been to dinner at the NCO Club at the Roswell Army Air Field and had gotten home late. They were already in bed when the telephone rang ordering him back to the base. He was gone for about eighteen hours and when he returned, his clothes were wet. He said that he had been through a decontamination process at the base before he had been allowed to leave. He didn’t really tell her why that had been necessary or exactly what the decontamination had been.

Anne wanted to know what had happened and he told her, reluctantly, that there have been a flying saucer crash outside of Roswell. She didn’t believe him but she still asked questions about it. She learned that the craft was saucer shaped and that there was a top layer that was oblong and had windows in it, at least according to what she remembered.

Robbins told his wife that there had been three beings on the craft. He used the word people. One was dead and two were alive. Later he would tell his son that the creatures had pear-shaped heads with large black eyes and brown skin. In a break with traditional descriptions, he said that they had no nose and no mouth.

And that was about all he would say about it to them. He followed, for the most part, the orders not to talk he had been given in 1947.

Frankie Rowe

Robbins wasn’t the only person to report that there had been survivors. Frankie Rowe, a young girl in 1947 and whose father worked for the Roswell Fire Department told me that her father had been on a fire run outside of Roswell when he saw the wrecked alien ship. She also said that she had handled debris from the craft. Skeptics have dismissed her testimony saying that it has been discredited, but the truth is, their criticisms of her are without merit and saying something is discredited is not really the same as discrediting it.

As just a single example, some have said that her tale of the Roswell Fire Department response to the crash is untrue because the site of the wreck is outside of Roswell and the fire department didn’t make runs outside the city limits. This came from a former city council member who was not on the council in 1947 but who stilled lived in Roswell in the mid-1990s.

To check this out, I went to the Roswell Fire Department and asked them about runs outside the city. One of the fire fighters asked what they were supposed to do. Let it burn? But what was true when I was there in 1992 might not have been true in 1947, so I looked at the log books that go back into the 1920s. The truth is the Fire Department did make runs outside the city as the fire logs show so it is not outside the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, there is no log for this particular run. For those with a conspiratorial turn of the mind, the claim might be that the Army managed to get the entry of that specific run removed so that there would be no documentation if anyone ever looked.

Rowe, who has granted several interviews, told her story in depth to me in January 1993. She said that her father had come home after his shift at the fire station (which lasted about twenty-four hours) and had something important to say. He then told them, according to Rowe, that they had gone about thirty miles outside of Roswell and then a few miles back to the west. He said there had been some kind of a crash and that he had called it a spaceship or a flying saucer or something.

Then she said one of the most important things. According to her, “I remember him saying that some of them helped pick up some pieces of the wreckage. He said he saw two bodies in bags and one that was walking around.”

She said, “…he said he was sure that there were bodies because the third one would go over to them… he talked about [how] this third one would go back and forth between different parts of the wreckage and was walking around dazed. He didn’t say if anyone tried to talk to this person.”

The creatures were, according to what Rowe remembered, about the size of a ten year old, meaning that they were smaller than a human adult. The color was like that of an insect called Child of the Earth (more commonly called the Jerusalem Cricket) which is sort of copper colored or maybe a sort of dark brown.

Rowe also saw a bit of metallic debris that a New Mexico State Trooper claimed to have picked up in the field. Rowe said that she thought it was about a week later. She’d had some dental work done previously and there were complications from it. She was in Roswell to have it repaired and when she finished at the dentist, she had gone over to the fire house to wait so that her father could drive her home.

The State Policeman came in while she was waiting to go home. He walked up to a table and said to the firemen, “You guys aren’t going to believe what I’ve got.” He pulled out his hand and had a piece of metal.

Rowe said, “I think I got to pick it up and crumple it one time. I can only remember doing it one time… It just didn’t feel like anything… it was kind of a pewter color… Everybody got out their knives or whatever and tried to cut and they tried to burn it.”

There is one problem, with all this, however. According to Rowe, she’d had some oral surgery which had begun to bled, which was why she had been in Roswell in the middle of July 1947. That was why she had been at the fire house when the State Policeman had brought in the metallic debris. She had gone in so that the dentist could treat her. Although records are not complete, there are none to show that Rowe’s oral surgery was done in July 1947 or that there were later complications as she suggested. I, and others, have been unable to confirm the dental work. While this is what she remembered, the reason for her being in Roswell could have been something more mundane and she forget about it.

Unfortunately, as has happened so often in this case, no researcher had a chance to talk with Rowe’s father to get his first-hand observations. He died long before the investigation began. But I did have the opportunity to talk with her sister, Helen Cahill. She was married in 1947 and living in California at the time of the crash, but had heard some discussion about the events during a visit to New Mexico in 1960. Although her information wasn’t as complete as that of Rowe, it confirmed, for what it’s worth, that Rowe did not invent the tale of the crash. Of course, it does little to validate it, except to suggest that Rowe’s father was talking about a UFO crash long before the reports of the Roswell events came to light and at a time when few people thought of UFOs as being from other worlds. Other explanations seemed to make people happier.

Beverley Bean

Adding to this mix of second-hand stories of survivors of the crash is Beverly Bean, a pleasant English woman, who told researchers about her father, Sergeant Melvin Brown who had been stationed at Roswell in 1947. Unlike some of those who have told stories about Roswell, Brown is in the Yearbook (just like a high school yearbook that contains the pictures of about 80 % of everyone assigned to the base) that Walter Haut created in 1947. It is a document that allows us to verify that a soldier did, in fact, serve at Roswell during the critical period without having to gather information from the records center in St. Louis.

Like so many of the others, Brown didn’t tell his story to investigators and it didn’t surface until after Jesse Marcel began talking of the crash in 1978. Interestingly, one of the documents offered by Bean to prove her father served in Roswell was an order with several names on it including Jesse Marcel.

In a video-taped interview conducted in England on January 4, 1991, Bean said, “Dad used to tell us this story and he didn’t tell us often.”

He told his daughter, according to what she said on tape, that he “had to go out into the desert. All available men were grabbed and they all went out into the desert in trucks where a crashed saucer had come down.”

Brown and another soldier whose name he never gave to his daughter, were pulled aside for guard duty. They were told not to look under the tarp in the truck, but Bean said, laughing, that the minute someone tells you that, the first thing you do is take a look. She said that he dad told her, “He and this other guy lifted up the tarpaulin or something…”

She said that she and her sister now argue about the number of alien creatures under the tarp. Bean says it was two, but her sister insists that it was three. No matter now. The point is that Brown described the creatures for them.

According to her, “He said they were smaller than us, not more than four foot tall… much larger heads than we have. Slanted eyes and [the skin was] yellowish.”

Bean wondered if he had been scared but he said that he wasn’t. He thought they had nice faces and they looked as if they would have been friendly. According to Bean, he repeated that as often as he told the story, which, over the years was fewer than a dozen times.

Bean, of course, sometimes pestered him for more information. After the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in 1977, she asked him about the movie and how authentic it might be. He said that it was the biggest load of crap he’d ever seen and not like the real thing at all. When she tried to learn more, he told her, “That’s all I can tell you. I can’t tell you anymore.”

The late Karl Pflock, in his book, Roswell, Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, complained that Bean’s story was second hand and that neither her sister nor her mother would comment on it. Pflock had to know that both the mother and the other daughter had confirmed the tale because he had access to the video tapes of those 1991 interviews. He is right about this being a tale told by the daughters and wife of the man who lived it. There is nothing that can be done about that. By the time his name surfaced in the investigation, he had died from complications of various lung diseases, but it is not true that his wife or other daughter refused to talk.

Ada Brown added little to the complex tale told by Beverly Bean when she was interviewed on video tape in 1991. She merely confirmed that she too had heard about the crash over the years and that it was something from another world. She seemed a little uncomfortable sharing a secret left by her husband.

Bean’s sister, Harriet Kercher, on January 4, 1991, was also interviewed on video tape. She had heard her father tell his tales a couple of times when Beverly was there, but there was one incident when Beverly was absent and her father gave her just a little more information.

Kercher, in her early teens said that she was with friends when she saw something flash by. Her friends saw it too, and then, in the distance, that something reappeared and seemed to be coming at them. Kercher said they were frightened by that shiny object but they weren’t far from her house so they ran there, slamming the door behind them.

Her father met them and asked them why they seemed to be in such a panic. Kercher said that her father, after hearing the tale of the shining object, told her, “It’s nothing to be frightened about.”

The friends didn’t understand, exactly, what he meant and he told them about the crashed flying saucer, saying that there were a few bodies on it. He provided few new details. He just made it clear that there was something about the creatures that suggested to him that they were not to be feared.

But, as Pflock said, these were second-hand reports and they could be the misinterpretation of the original story. If the witness saw anything it all, it was minor, such as Frankie Rowe seeing the piece of metallic debris that seemed to be something from another technology but might have been misunderstood by a twelve-year-old girl recovering from dental surgery. It is not proof, or even a suggestion of proof of something extraterrestrial.

First-Hand Witnesses

There are, however, some who have told first-hand stories and who were clearly in Roswell at the time of the UFO crash. One of those is Anna Willmon, who I met a number of years ago, just about a year or so before her death. She was a nice woman whose memory was not as sharp as it once had been. She remembered some details of her encounter with the Roswell crash, but some of her memories are at odds with what others recalled. The passage of time might have colored her memories as to exact details, but her story fits into, generally, the whole of the Roswell case.

She told me, during both a telephone and later a video-taped interview, that she had been in the Capitan Mountains west of Roswell with her first husband, W. I. Witcamp. As they returned from a long morning of work at a saw mill, they saw something shining off the highway and stopped to look for it. They were about twenty miles from Roswell along what is known as the Pine Lodge Road.

Together she and her husband moved through the brush until they came to an object shaped like an overturned washtub, which means that it was circular, or to stretch the point, saucer-like. She didn’t think it was very large, maybe twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. She did see bodies of the flight crew, or “little guys” as she called them.

She said that the surface of the craft was very shiny, almost mirror-like. It was in two pieces. One of them sat up on four short, stubby legs and the other, looking as it if had been knocked from the top in the crash, was sitting a short distance away. She insisted on calling it a flying saucer and said that her husband had called it that repeatedly.

She didn’t see much of the creatures because as she approached one, with the thought of turning it over, her husband stopped her. He was afraid of radiation or maybe disease. He didn’t want her to touch them, or the remains of the craft.

She said that there were two bodies. One lying face down in the dirt and the other in the shade of some cedar trees, as if he had crawled over there before he died. She did say the skin looked like burnt rubber. It was a grayish-brown, she said, that was hard to define.

She said, “…that other one was laying up kinda towards this brush and the other was out back… like he had been flung out of the thing. And this other little guy looked like he’d got out and went off and laid down… And he wasn’t very big. He was about as big as a little five year old kid. A little one.”

She said that one of them was slim, skinny, with short arms and little hands and feet. The other one, the one she thought might have survived the crash only to die a little later, was chubby. His arms were short and his feet looked like human feet. His skin tones matched those of the other. The only real difference was that he was heavier than his fellow.

She said that they were dressed the same. They worn green shorts and nothing else. She could see their backs and said that they looked normal. The skin was rubber-like. But she made it clear that these were small creatures. She mentioned that repeatedly.

She kept no diary and wrote no letters that mentioned the incident. Those she knew in 1947, who might be able to corroborate what she had seen were, in 1994, long dead. All she had now, was a tale that fit, generally, into the scheme of things told be other witnesses and like so many of those, she had no way to verify the information and no proof for what she said.

To be fair, the timing of her story and the location, only twenty miles from Roswell and north of the Pine Lodge Road doesn’t fit with other information that has been developed. That she and her husband were there, in the late afternoon and prior to the arrival of the military doesn’t really work either. She made it clear that they had gone to a ranch house to call the military. However, she did the best she could to answer the questions and seemed sincere in what she said.

She did say that they had talked to a colonel, but then her husband had a habit of calling any military man “colonel.” She said that they had been cautioned not to talk about what they had seen, but it seemed to have been more of a request than it had been an order. Certainly, she didn’t perceive it as a threat. Just a suggestion they not mention it to anyone else.

She didn’t seem surprised by the reaction of the “colonel” either. He seemed to be aware of the situation, as if this was not the first such site that he had visited. This suggests that there might have been more than a single site where bodies were found, which does fit with information being developed today.

Martin Jorgenson

Martin Jorgenson walked into the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell and mentioned, off-hand, casually, that he had been around Roswell in 1947. Don Burleson, a Roswell resident, happened to be in the museum at the time and, according to Burleson, “[I] tackled the guy (almost literally).

Sometimes called “Tex” by researchers, Jorenson said that he was a civilian working for the military and that he, along with his colleagues, stumbled onto the site while searching for a drone jet aircraft that had been tested on July 3 but that had crashed somewhere near Roswell. He, along with several NCOs had been told to find it.

As they neared the site, Jorgenson said that he saw pieces of bright silver metal. The metal appeared to be very light and later he would learn quite hard. He said that he saw some sort of writing, that is “hieroglyphics” on it.

The craft, he said, was stubby with curved-back wings. It was a small object, about twenty feet long and only about 12 to 14 feet wide. It had the look of some of the rocket ships in the old Buck Rogers serials.

There were three creatures. One was dead, one, though alive, was slumped over and the third was standing in the canopy looking at the men. They were all small, with a grayish, greenish skin, and dark slanted eyes. They had large heads and small noses.

Unlike Willmon, but like others, Jorgenson said they were wearing uniforms, or what might have been uniforms, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t notice their hands or their feet.

Jorgenson said that he left the site shortly after the recovery began. He returned to the base and there he was warned not to talk about what he had seen. He said that he had to sign some kind of an oath or a non-disclosure agreement. He thought, by the time he said anything to Burleson and others, that the agreement had expired.

There is one real concern about this story. Jorgenson said that he was assigned to the base where this jet drone project was located and it was a test flight that went astray. There are no records to corroborate this. And his discussion of using radar to track it is also a worry, given the nature of the terrain and the locations of the various radars in 1947. Had this test gone astray from White Sands Proving Grounds or from Alamogordo Army Air Field, the radars there wouldn’t have been able to track it much below 10,000 feet, which meant it could have crashed almost anywhere. The search probably would have been conducted by aircraft and not guys in a jeep.

Thomas Gonzales

Another first-hand witness who can provide little in the way of corroboration is Thomas Gonzales, a sergeant who told John Price and Don Ecker that he had seen the bodies of the alien creatures. Like so many of the others, Gonzales was not a member of the Military Police or any other of the law enforcement units assigned to the base. He was a sergeant in the transportation section, but, as Bean mentioned, they had swept through the base looking for all available men. Gonzales was one of those.

Skeptics, in fact, have made much of the fact that some of these witnesses were not assigned to either the security or military police units on the base. But then, Bean said, the sergeants had come through looking for anyone they could impress into service. Such things have happened before in the Army and it fits with the general concept that every soldier has basic training that would allow him (or in today’s world, her) to be used in a variety of ways, as the situation dictated. All basic trainees learn how to stand a proper guard.

Gonzales described the craft as looking more like an airfoil than it did like a saucer. He said that the bodies were like “little men” but not like the “greys” of the more recent abduction literature.

Gonzales, when I interviewed him, was reluctant to talk and I fear that my style in this particular interview was more forceful than it needed to be. I was attempting to verify his credentials, though his picture in the Roswell Yearbook certainly put him at the base at the right time. And I wanted to make sure that the information that I had was correct. It had been filtered a couple of times, and sometimes during the passing of information, it becomes distorted. That didn’t seem to be the case here.

Unfortunately, Gonzales was not an articulate man, and when I talked to him a dozen years ago, he was 78. His son said that his father had been telling the story for years, long before the information about Roswell became well known. Like Beverly Bean and her sister Harriet Kercher, Gonzales’ son verified a date in the 1960s as being one of the first times he’d heard his father mention the Roswell case.

Gonzales also mentioned that he had trouble with the military after he was involved there. He suggested he was transferred quickly and in the process, lost some personal property. The rumor is that many of those involved were quickly transferred from the base. However, the unit history provides information about transfers into and out of the 509^th. The records seem to indicate that there was not an appreciable increase in transfers in July or August. The numbers remained consistent with those of earlier months. This does not mean, however, that specific people weren’t transferred out.

The Military Police at Roswell

There are some former members of the military police at Roswell who have come forward with stories about the crash and the alien creatures. One such man I’ll call Sergeant Johnson which is his real name, but since Johnson is the second most common last name in the United States and since his picture does not appear in the Yearbook, it will be difficult to trace him. I will say that I am in possession of records, obtained through the Army (or I probably should say here that John Carpenter obtained directly from the Army)that show SGT Johnson was stationed at Roswell at the proper time, and that he was a member of the 1395^th MP Company, though he was not a sergeant then.

Johnson was the acting corporal of the guard when they received a telephone call that said there was a crash up near Corona. Johnson was told to take a detail of four men but ended up taking about a dozen to secure the site. They drove to Corona, talked to the police and a few people to get directions and then drove out to the crash site. Johnson said that the craft had impacted and was standing at a twenty to thirty degree angle from the ground. He said, sort of confirming what Anna Willmon said, that the craft was about twelve to fourteen feet in diameter and that it was very light, no more than half a ton or maybe 1200 pounds. Reflecting on it, he now suspects the craft was made of some kind of composite material.

According to what he told John Carpenter, there were three dead creatures and one that was alive. In a variation of a theme, Johnson said that the aliens were wearing “what looked like a complete fabric covering over their bodies.” It was silver colored.

He said the creatures were short, just over four feet tall and maybe weighed ninety pounds. Their heads were covered by some kind of a hood but he could see two oval-shaped eyes, two holes where the nose would be, only lower on the face. He said that there might have been glass or plastic or something covering the eyes. They were a dark color that was so black that it looked to be slightly blue (This, I suspect, was an attempt to validate the information provided by Gerald Anderson, discussed in a later chapter).

He said that the suit covered everything so that he couldn’t see the skin or if there was hair on the head. He didn’t see enough, or remember enough to described hands or feet. He also said he saw nothing that resembled blood. I suppose it’s unnecessary to point out that his description of the clothing does not match, even closely, that described by Anna Willmon.

Johnson said that he, along with the men he had taken with him, were the only people there the first night. He said that they didn’t sleep, not with the alien creature walking around, though at some point it did lay down. He said that he wasn’t sure if the alien had gone to sleep or not but thought it had remained awake because it seemed to be moving restlessly all the time.

According to Johnson, the bodies, and the living creature were taken from the site early the next morning. According to Johnson, the bodies, and later the craft, were taken to Wright Field, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He had no direct knowledge of this, but it was what he had been told, or what he learned later.

Once his tour at the site was over, he, along with the others, were taken back to Roswell. Johnson said that he hadn’t told his first wife about the crash because he was under orders not to. Under questioning it became clear that he was referring to a fairly standard warning given to all soldiers who hold a top secret clearance. Sharing information with those not authorized to have it could result in a big fine and up to twenty years in prison.

He did say, however, that every so often he would get a call reminding him of his obligations. They would tell him that he knew the rules and that he had children.

Evaluating the Tales

If we look at these stories with a skeptical eye, we would have to note that a number of them are second hand. We can’t interview those who witnessed the event, but must now rely on the statements of friends and family. Such statements are open to interpretation and misunderstanding. Even members of the same family don’t agree on all the details. Beverly Bean believes her father said there were two creatures on the site but her sister remembers that he said three.

Of course it can be suggested that such a disagreement in the details is of little overall significance. What is important is that all these witnesses suggest that bodies were recovered and at a minimum, one of the creatures survived long enough for the Army to arrive.

There are differences in the descriptions of the alien creatures, but again, we are working from the memories of men and women who are very old or from what family members claim they were told. And, it is necessary to point out that some of these discrepancies can be explained by points of view. One soldier saw three alien creatures and another saw four. It could be that the first simply didn’t observe the fourth based on where he was and what he was doing at the time. It could also mean, as has been suggested by others, that there were more than one site. Skeptics make much of the numbers game, but in the end, it is a trivial detail that actually means nothing.

No, the important point, from a skeptical point of view is that Robbins, Rowe, Bean and Kercher, are relating what others told them about the crash. They did not witness it themselves and there is no documentation to back up their claims. Yes, we can, and have verified, that the soldiers who told the original stories were assigned to Roswell, or in Rowe’s case, was a fireman in Roswell, but all that does is give their fathers or husbands the opportunity to see what he claimed to have seen. It doesn’t prove the story valid.

So, we move onto the first-hand accounts. All four were elderly when they told their stories. All were assigned to the base at Roswell in some capacity, or in the case of Willmon, lived in the area. Gonzales is in the Yearbook that Walter Haut produced in 1947 and Army Records Center supplied documentation that clearly puts Johnson there at the same time and, more importantly, shows his assignment to the military police company. Only Jorgenson’s connection is troublesome.

However, in each case, the witness appeared long after all the initial interest in the case. Gonzales was in Roswell and walked into the UFO Enigma Museum to talk with John Price. Jorgenson was in Roswell and walked into the International UFO Museum. Willmon’s name was given to me by another source, who also told me that her story had once been more robust and interesting. Johnson said that he’d had both heart attacks and a stroke so that his memory wasn’t as good as it once had been. To complicate matters, Stan Friedman sent Johnson copies of his reports and books before Johnson was properly interviewed the first time so that a case can be made that Johnson’s memory was contaminated (again, this idea of the dark blue eyes comes to mind).

But here is the other thing. All these witnesses were either low-ranking enlisted men or members of the civilian world outside the base. All tell similar stories, meaning they talk of a crashed saucer with the details matching in many respects, and all suggest that one or more of the creatures survived.

I, at one time, tried to find all the members of the 1395^th MP Company. I went through the Yearbook and then matched the names to telephone numbers thanks to computer programs and free white pages sites. One of those I found was Leo Spear, who I interviewed in June 1994.

Spear himself hadn’t gone out but he was in the barracks when some of the others came in. He told me, “I can’t remember if it was the evening shift or if it was the next morning when they came in with a cock and bull story [Here the skeptics could lift a quote out of context to change the whole meaning of what Spear said]… these guys come in but they said the truck come in and they brought in some stuff from a UFO… that crashed north of Roswell. And we thought they was BS-ing until we read the article about it…”

The timing seems to suggest that those MP s who went out to guard the site had gone out the day before the article appeared in the newspaper. They had come back late that evening when Spear and the others thought they were making up the tale. When they saw the article in the next day’s newspaper, they changed their tunes.

Of course the Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, who would have been the top cop on the post at the time never told me much about the crash when I interviewed him. He did suggest that something extraterrestrial had fallen and made a cryptic comment to his family just before he died. He said, “Oh, the creatures.” Certainly not much in the way of confirmation but just as clearly not a rejection of the idea that something alien had crashed.

There is one other aspect that should be mentioned here because the skeptics will certainly notice it. Anna Willmon talked of a site much closer to Roswell than Johnson talked about. Jesse Marcel said nothing about alien creatures but did talk of a large field of strange metallic debris. What this suggests is that all these people are talking of a single event, but one that they witnessed on different sites. Willmon’s description suggests something more akin to an escape pod than an interstellar craft. And that might just explain some of these discrepancies.

So, here’s where we are at the end of the day. A number of men who were in a position to know about the crash gave family members information about it. They discussed bodies and they discussed a survivor. They gave descriptions of the crash. Their stories match, in a general way, but there are some discrepancies. We have virtually no documentation to support the tales of the crash, but we do have corroboration from a large number of others who were there.

In the end, it’s up to each person to decide what level he or she wants to assign this evidence. While the second-hand testimony, in most courts in most cases would not be allowed (though with Melvin Brown it could be considered a dying declaration), we have a body of first-hand testimony that would be allowed. Is it enough to “prove” that something extraterrestrial fell at Roswell? Given the numbers, I believe it is.