Case closed: reflections on the 1997 Air Force Roswell report - Roswell, New Mexico - Special Section: The Aliens Files - Cover Story

Here are some of the actual witness statements described in the Air Force report (MacAndrew 1997):

"They were using dummies in those damned things. . . . It was either dummies or bodies or something laying there . . ." (Jim Ragsdale, p. 69).

"I thought they were plastic dolls." "No hair . . . completely bald" (Gerald Anderson, pp. 69-70).

The Air Force report presented twenty-four witness statements that corroborated the dummy hypothesis to some degree. There are more witness statements in the popular Roswell literature that also lend support to the dummy explanation:

"They seemed to have no inertia, seemed to be like insects, maybe they were robots" (Third-hand from flight crew on scene, in Friedman and Berliner 1992, 53).

"It had that damned serene look on its face" (Steve Mackenzie, in Randie and Schmitt 1994, 12).

"The mouth apparently does not 'function as a means of communication or as an orifice for food ingestion,' and there are no teeth. . . . There was no hair on the head. . . . No perspiration or body odor" (UFO researcher Len Stringfield's confidential sources, in Randie and Schmitt 1994, 82).

"Looked like twins" (Leon Visse, in Fumoux 1981).

The Mechanics of Time Distortion

Critics of the Air Force report contend that the dummy drops were years too late to account for any part of the Roswell incident. The dummy drops ran from 1954 to 1959, seven to twelve years after the incident. But the real time gap is the period of decades between the supposed events of 1947 and the time when the "witnesses" finally spoke out. The problem was stated well by mortician Glenn Dennis in the Fall 1995 Omni magazine: ". . . [W]hen I talked to Friedman, that was the first time I tried to recall the whole experience in 40 years or more. I was remembering out loud and made some mistakes. It's hard to get such old memories straight." Difficulties with recollections of long-past events were also voiced in Randie and Schmitt 1994 ("This witness, however, told us a story . . . changing the date of the crash, the location of the bodies and craft, shape of the ship. . . . "p. 220), Friedman and Berliner 1992 ("There are certainly discrepancies, but after 43 years, memories begin to fade and swirl together. . . . "p. 122), and Good 1988 ("Since it's been 27 years, details like this are pretty foggy, and I may even be influenced by other descriptions I've seen or heard in the interim. . . . ").

It appears that events strung out over a number of years in the distant past may indeed have been cobbled together to form the basis of a supposed single event. Figure 1 shows some of the balloon activities in the area (Mogul, High Dive and Excelsior, Vee balloon, Viking/Voyager) that certainly contributed to UFO sightings in general and might also have contributed to the Roswell phenomenon. There have been thousands of skyhook balloons launched from the Holloman AFB Ballon Branch over fifty years, with many far exceeding the famous Hindenberg zeppelin in size. The skyhooks, shining brilliantly in changing colors high in the stratosphere while the earth's surface was still in darkness, generated countless UFO reports. In 1972, this same Air Force group launched Project Viking nose cones from Roswell. These vehicles looked like classic UFOs and routinely generated many UFO sightings, despite preflight publicity.