I did try to get some confirmation and did call a couple of times. Eventually I received a very nice letter from one of Easley’s daughters explaining how sick her father was and that he mother, under stress of this terminal illness had decided I was a government agent trying to “get” something on her husband. Not wanting to cause the family additional grief, I dropped the matter.
But there is some corroborative testimony for Easley. Joe Stefula, a researcher living in New Jersey tracked down another of the officers who had been assigned to the MP company at Roswell in July 1947. The man, former 1st Lt. Chester Barton told Stefula, as he told me later, that Major Easley had told him to go out to the crash site. He said, "The military police had guards there."
Describing the site for Stefula, and later for me, Barton said that it took them about forty-five minutes to get out to the site, confirming a detail from Lewis Rickett. He said that they hit a checkpoint, confirming still another detail.
The area was filled with parts of the craft and there was a burned area. The best description that Barton could offer was that the debris looked like the remains of a crashed aircraft. He did mention that some of the military police were using Geiger counters and that they did detect some radiation in certain spots.
Barton said that there weren’t any large pieces of it and no signs of a propeller or engines. He said that it appeared as if the object had bounced two or three times before it came to rest.
When he arrived, according to what he told Stefula, there wasn’t much left to see. Just the burned areas and a lot of little junk that Barton thought would be hauled away to the junk yard.
Later, he would read about the weather balloon explanation. He said, “I remember people saying it was a weather balloon but I didn’t pay much attention to that story.”
To be fair, it must be noted that Barton said, “Based on what I saw, I still believe it was a B-29. I heard very little about the bodies. They were taken to the hospital, but I didn’t see them. I know it was a hush-hush deal and Easley told us to keep our mouth’s shut.”
Barton followed his orders and remained quiet, not even telling his wife about those events, until Stefula called him. To him it was nothing more than an aircraft accident and had nothing to do with balloons.
It should be noted here that nearly everyone who has researched the crash looked into the possibility of an aircraft accident. None of us found anything like that. The Air Force, which would have much better access to such records did the same thing with the same results. There were no aircraft accidents, not military, not civilian and not experimental that would account for the strange debris.
So Easley's testimony, corroborated by multiple sources, and especially that from February 1991, is extremely important to understanding the nature of the Roswell case. Had the object found been of mundane configuration, had it merely been an aircraft of some new design, or even a weather balloon that had been launched as part of a top secret project, Easley would have known simply because of who he was and what he did at Roswell. He wouldn't have been sworn to secrecy, and he certainly wouldn't have said that it was something extraterrestrial in origin if that hadn’t been the case.
I do fill obligated to make one additional comment here. I have said that the testimony is corroborated and that is true. Each of the things I have reported were heard by others and who verified those comments to still others. This however, is just corroboration that Easley did make the original statements and certainly does nothing to underscore the veracity of those statements. Documentation for that would be nice, but we just don’t have anything written down for us to examine.
What this really says is that the majority of the staff officers we were able to interview confirmed, as best they could, that something extraterrestrial happened at Roswell. Yes, there were those who said that nothing happened, or that they were unaware of anything extraordinary, but these minority voices would lose simply because they are in the minority.
More Flight Crew Testimony
Kent, in his article, said that he had talked to a number of pilots who were stationed in Roswell in July 1947 but who had heard nothing about the crash. To him this evidence was persuasive. There, however, reports from other pilots who did know something about the case.
As has happened so often in this story, a witness who had something important to say died before he could be interviewed on tape so we are left with the second-hand accounts of family. Such is the case of Oliver “Pappy” Henderson, who would tell close friends and his family about flying some of the wreckage on to Wright Field.
Sappho Henderson, a very nice lady, would tell researcher Len Stringfield first, and then repeat for me on video tape, about her husband’s involvement in the case. She said that they had been to the grocery store when he picked up one of the tabloid newspapers (probably the National Enquirer)and showed it to her. He told her at that time, according to what she said to me, “He said, ‘Well, I’ve been wanting to tell you this for years… I guess now it’s not top secret if they’re putting it in the paper.’ And he said the story is true.”
Although he didn’t explain to his wife how he had happen to see the bodies of the alien creatures, he did say that the drawings accompanying the article were accurate. These were drawings of small creatures with big heads and large eyes. Slender creatures that seemed to be frail.
Other than the nature of the cargo, and the events surrounding its collection, there was nothing spectacular about the flight. It was just a routine mission to Wright Field.
Later, in 1982, at a reunion of soldiers who had flown in the Second World War, Henderson told his old flight crew about the Roswell case. Stan Friedman managed to interview one of the men who told him, “It was in his hotel room that he told us the story of the UFO and about his part. All we were told by Pappy is that he flew the plane to Wright Field. He definitely mentioned the bodies, but I don’t recall any details except they were small and different…”
There were crewmen who also talked about flights out of Roswell with either the bodies or wreckage. Len Stringfield was in communication with Lloyd Thompson. He mentioned the names of the men on the crew with him and these included Robert Slusher.
Slusher told me, on video tape, that he, and his crew had been on the skeet range on orders of the squadron operations officer, Edgar Skelly, who told the aircraft commander that a special mission might be coming up. Slusher said that all of them had heard rumors that a flying saucer and bodies had been found. Once it was decided the flight would be made, the crew was sent out to pre-flight the B-29, but were rushed through it.
Slusher said that they were ordered to the pit where the bombs were normally kept where they were met by armed guards. They loaded a crate (and Slusher once gave the dimensions which would have been too large for the forward bomb bay which caused skeptics to reject his story) and took off for Fort Worth.
They never climbed above eight thousand feet, which was unusual, and when they landed in Fort Worth, they were met by six people. According to Slusher in a signed affidavit, “They took possession of the crate. The crate was loaded on a flatbed weapons carrier and hauled off… The sixth person was an undertaker who had been a classmate on our flight, Lt. Felix Martucci.”
Slusher said that on the return flight, they flew above 20,000 feet. He said, “After returning to Roswell, we realized that what was in the crate was classified. There were rumors that they [the crate] had carried debris from the crash.”