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

The Gerald Anderson story (see Friedman and Berliner 1992, 90-92) is another splendid microcosm of the entire Roswell web. Many of the descriptions he provides can be correlated with actual military events in New Mexico - only these events occurred over a period of many years, not days.

Supposedly, in July 1947, five-year-old Anderson and family stumbled upon the main spaceship near the plains of St. Agustin, 120 miles to the west of the Roswell/Corona area.

The first thing he noted was "a circular silver object . . . kind of balanced up on one of the trees." Next, he said, "it crossed my mind that it was a dirigible, a blimp that had crashed. . . . " It turns out that on one occasion the Holloman Balloon Branch had tethered a mini-blimp at 10,000 feet, near the northern boundary of the WSMR. It broke loose during a thunderstorm and was located a few days later, near Socorro. Socorro borders the plains of St. Agustin. But that blimp tore loose in 1972.

Next, Anderson noted, "It tore up a lot of sagebrush and there were small fires smoldering here and there. . . ." The Explosive Materials Research and Test Center (EMRTC) operates in a rugged area west of Socorro, on the northern fringes of the plains of St. Agustin. It performs research on explosive materials, including the demolition of aircraft fuselages. Anderson's family might have stumbled on the aftermath of such a test. He later described MPs coming out of trucks to order them out of the area. A gash in the hull revealing a multitude of cables and wires is possibly further evidence of the true nature of what they saw. But such tests were not conducted until after 1950.

Next, Anderson described the "aliens": "[H]is eyes was [sic] open, staring blankly. . . . I thought they were dolls. I didn't think they were alive. . . ." He said a truck convoy arrived and crews began a ritual. The activities of the crew and the vehicles, as described by Anderson, closely fit a description of a Holloman Balloon crew preparing an anthropomorphic dummy launch for Project High Dive. The payload people may have arrived first, and Anderson probably saw the dummies lying outside, while the crew was inside the instrumentation van. He also gave a good description of the tracking aircraft. But the events that Anderson described took place in February 1959, not July 1947. And they took place somewhere between White Sands, Roswell, and Corona, not near the plains of Augstin.

Anderson added other testimony, extracted from a family diary. It described an event near Magdalena, in the plains of St. Agustin. The story involved ranchers seeing a flying disc in that area, with government officials restricting access. Perhaps they witnessed the aftermath of a classified Discoverer satellite nose-cone launch from Magdalena. From a distance, dangling from the crane prior to launch activities, the satellite would have looked decidedly disc-shaped. But that was in 1960.

The weaving of these four disparate time-space events into a single space opera, if this in fact occurred, would have been worthy of Shakespeare. Perhaps many of these events were innocently combined into a single event by Anderson, a victim of a faded memory. But, considering Anderson's proven duplicity with diaries and phone records (Klass 1997), he may have strung together real or imagined events quite deliberately. Either way, the episode highlights the magnitude of the task originally confronting the USAF investigators.