Or, what if the Air Force believed that none of the living officers would respond to the allegation so there was nothing to fear in the way of a lawsuit? The problem would remain that either high-ranking officers were fairly incompetent, or were, in fact liars. That certainly wouldn’t make the Air Force look very good no matter which way the public opinion broke.
They took the only course available to them and that was to ignore the testimony of these men. Let the UFO researchers and the debunkers fight it out, let one side smear the names and reputations of the other, and ignore the problem.
The only trouble with that course was that it makes the Air Force investigation look incomplete. Why not interview these men or listen to the tapes of what they had to say? Listen for the nuances of their statements, look for the leading nature of the questions, point out any inaccuracies if they could be found, but don’t ignore a body of important evidence because you probably won’t like the outcome.
As we have seen, it’s easy to smear someone, turn a word or a phase around and suggest the person isn’t honest. We’ve all seen the negative campaign ads that take a statement or vote out of context to suggest the opposition is something less than human. In fact, in Iowa, during a nasty turn in a campaign ad one candidate suggested the other might be a communist because a communist group had endorsed one of his ideas. In today’s world, who really cares? But more importantly, the candidate was obviously not a communist and his support of raising the minimum wage induced the communist endorsement. Suggesting the candidate was a communist was not based on fact but on allegation. It was a twisted point of view told to win votes and the accuracy of the statement, or how the endorsement had been made was not important.
Today, we must look beyond that and decide if these men, whose words have been twisted by the reporters and investigators, were honest in what they said. The simple answer is, “Yes.” The complex answer is “Yes, but they could be mistaken.”
Chapter Seven: Too Many Witnesses?
So, suddenly, there are a number of people who were in Roswell in July 1947 and who claimed to have both handled the debris and who had seen the military cordon surrounding the Debris Field. These are reliable witnesses who reluctantly told their stories and whose descriptions of events generally matched one another. These were people who were found by researchers. Unfortunately, as the case became bigger and received more attention, others came forward to tell their tales. As we investigated them, we learned that some of them were inventing them.
Walter Haut, who insisted for years that he had just provided the press release to the various news outlets in Roswell also became the unofficial center of Roswell research. He would furnish clues and give the names of those who might not have been as involved as they would like others to believe. Walter became a conduit for the information.
Sitting in Haut’s front room one evening, I was asking about the mortician who I’d heard about. No one seemed to have a name, just a slight description. One man even told me that the man now worked part time in the Albuquerque Public Library. Haut, however, looked at me and said, “I know the name you’re fishing for. It’s Glenn Dennis.”
Glenn Dennis
According to the information publically available,Dennis lived in Roswell in 1947, but was not a mortician at the time, merely an embalmer. He worked at the Ballard Funeral Home on Main Street. Dennis was the most reluctant of witnesses, being cagey, suggesting that he wasn’t going to talk, but in the end always told his story to anyone who asked about it, especially if they had a video camera and access to the national media.
Dennis, in various taped interviews with various researchers and documentary producers and in discussions with me, said that he had been working alone when a call came in asking about coffins, small coffins, that could be hermetically sealed. This disturbed Dennis and he decided to drive out to the base. There, at the hospital, he found very unusual activity. Inside he saw a nurse he knew, later he said it was Naomi Self, and asked her what happened. She told him he needed to get out before he got into trouble but her warning was too late. An MP, a red-haired officer, spotted him and had him escorted from the hospital.
His story didn’t end there. He confessed that going into the hospital he’d looked into the rear of an ambulance and saw strange metallic debris stored in it. He said it looked like part of a canoe with unidentifiable writing on it.
And even that wasn’t enough. He met Self later and she described the events that had everyone worked up. Some strange little creatures had been brought into the hospital, apparently killed in some sort of accident. According to Dennis, she made a quick sketch of what the creatures looked like and provided a verbal description of the events. Before she left him that evening, she shredded the sketch so that small piece of evidence too, was lost.
Dennis, in interviews with researchers, was reluctant to provide the nurse’s name, saying that he had promised her that he would not break her confidence. He also said that he had written to her once, through an Army Post Office (APO) after she had given him her address when she was transferred in July 1947, supposedly because of what she had seen. His letter came back marked deceased and he was told that she had been killed with four other nurses in an aircraft accident.
I tried to verify this and searched through the New York Times Index. These are volumes that list all the articles from the Times according to type (and were a valuable resource prior to the explosion of information on the Internet). I could look through aircraft accidents, and look only at military aircraft accidents. There was enough information that if anything looked promising, all I had to do was pull the microfilm for that day and read the whole article. I failed to find anything that matched Dennis’ story.
That was one of the first failures to corroborate Dennis’ tale. His description of the base hospital in 1947 was inaccurate, but that certainly could be the result of a flawed memory. I attached no real importance to that mistake.
But the real search was for Naomi Self. Dennis was quite clear about the name. He told me he didn’t want it shared with others. He wanted a quiet search to find this woman he had known about forty years earlier. In fact, during a conversation one night, he wanted to know why I hadn’t found her. He’d given me the name months earlier. I told him we had searched and actually found four women named Naomi Self but none was the right one.
Dennis, however, wasn’t as tight lipped with Self’s name as he had often claimed. Others had it, some with the variation of Naomi Maria Selff. It didn’t matter.
Vic Golubic, a researcher then living in Arizona also learned the name from Dennis and began a search for her. He ran through the list of nurses assigned to the base from 1946 to 1948. He checked the local hospitals. He looked in the base telephone directory and then began a search through the records of the Army. He included intensive genealogical search of Minnesota families because Dennis thought she was from there. He identified and located the Cadet Nurse Corps Identification Cards. He went to the morning reports for the medical personnel at Roswell. He checked with the VA and other veteran organizations. In other words, he looked everywhere there should have been a trace of Naomi Self and he found none. He had, as they say, proved the negative. No one by the name of Naomi Self had served in any capacity at Roswell or even in the Army at the critical time.