As the research continued, Dennis began to spin the story. Now, he was telling people that when we pressed for a name, he gave us a fake name. He claimed that he had told us all at the time that he’d give us a name but that it wouldn’t be a real name. If we wanted a name, we could have one.
And then he said the name of the nurse was really Naomi Sipes. He’d just mislead us on the last name. But, of course, no nurse with that name appeared in any of the records that had been searched.
Finally, he said that he hadn’t given us any of her name. It didn’t matter that he had suggested earlier that we had failed him somehow by not finding his nurse. He had told her that he wouldn’t tell anyone who she was and he hadn’t.
This suggested that the nurse, and the story of the nurse, was the invention of Glenn Dennis. We’d been unable to verify almost everything he said about his involvement. All possible areas of documentation that he had suggested failed to produce results.
Looking back on it, it becomes clear that Dennis’ tale doesn’t emerge until the late 1980s, after the pictures of alien busts had appeared in the Roswell Daily Record and after there had been a book, magazine articles and a number of TV reports. It is also fairly clear that the story of the nurse given by Dennis, while exciting, is not based in fact.
Frank Kaufmann and The Nine
Walter Haut was also responsible for Frank Kaufmann. Haut told me that one man I’d want to talk to was Kaufmann. I could learn a great deal from him and I could find his telephone number in the Roswell telephone directory.
I called Frank Kaufmann for the first time on January 4, 1990 and told him that Walter Haut had given me his name. I mentioned that I was looking into the flying saucer event of July, 1947 and asked if he had been involved in some fashion.
His response, which would become typical of him was, “Well… I don’t know.”
He hinted during that first conversation that he knew a little more and for the first time introduced a warrant officer named Robert Thomas who would eventually evolve into a general who had been traveling in 1947 as a warrant officer. A general arriving at Roswell, especially after the announcement they had found a flying saucer would be big news. A warrant officer coming in wouldn’t stir much interest.
So Kaufmann was cagey, though he admitted to having seen the Unsolved Mysteries broadcast about the crash. He suggested that they were mostly right, but he objected to the Jesse Marcel story of taking debris home to show the family. Kaufmann said that it would have been classified before Marcel went to pick it up. He was saying the military had more information than they had admitted to having.
Over the next several years Kaufmann granted more interviews including a long one on video tape, and finally said that he had been deeply involved, that he was on the inside and had helped plan the retrieval and the cover-up. He worked with a corps of specialists of all ranks who became known, at least to him, as the Nine. He would provide some documents to prove his case and suggested that he had more and better documents that he would release some time later. He did show me a couple of those and one of them, if it could be believed, was the smoking gun. It was from Major Edwin Easley and it discussed the retrieval operation and suggested the craft was from another world. The date was late 1947 and there would be no way to counter such an explosive document.
Kaufmann took us to a site that he said was where the main craft and the alien bodies had been found. He described the scene in detail, even commenting on how peaceful one of the dead aliens looked. Later he would take others to a different location.
There were those who didn’t believe Kaufmann. Some thought his story was too good, some were convinced he was lying simply because they refused to accept the idea that an alien ship had crashed, and there were those who didn’t believe because Kaufmann had not told his story to them before giving it to me. Such is the nature of the UFO field.
On the other side were little things that seemed to corroborate Kaufmann’s story. Little details that he couldn’t have known at the time he was giving us the main pieces of his story and things we learned later. Of course, if you provide enough details, some of them are going to match newly discovered facts. This is called coincidence.
Kaufmann’s story unraveled after he died. In among his papers were found original documents, as well as the forgeries that proved he was lying. For example, he had made it clear that he was a former master sergeant who had specialized intelligence training. His military records showed that he had been a staff sergeant with training in administration but no intelligence courses. The document he had showed to prove his claims was not the same as the original found later. Clearly he had fabricated one.
So Kaufmann’s story, like that of Dennis, fell apart. The details didn’t match his claims and there was no reason to believe that he had been an insider. None of those he named as having been with him were ever found, though he had given us some names. No corroboration for his wild tales meant that we could now reject his story as invention.
Gerald Anderson
The same could be said for Gerald Anderson, who wasn’t one of Haut’s witnesses, but who surfaced after the Unsolved Mysteries rebroadcast in 1990. Anderson claimed that as a five-year-old boy he had been on a rock hunting expedition with his family when they had stumbled over the remains of a crashed disk on the western side of the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. This was the site that Barney Barnett, a soil conservation engineer had give to friends in the early 1950s. It was the only link to a craft and bodies that had been discovered until so many other witnesses surfaced in the 1990s.
Anderson told a marvelous tale of seeing the craft, four alien creatures lying near it. Three were dead and one injured, or maybe, according to Anderson two were dead, one was injured and one was attempting to help its fellows. The descriptions of the creatures varied as well, with Anderson changing his story as he learned more about aliens and what researchers expected them to look like.
Anderson, it seemed, now corroborated the Barnett tale of a crashed disk on the Plains of San Agustin, provided new and exciting details, including the descriptions of the aliens, and even talked of a nasty red-haired officer which corroborated part of the Glenn Dennis story. If what Anderson said was true, then an important witness had been found.
But there were problems with Anderson’s tale. He talked of a Dr. Adrian Buskirk who had been the leader of the archaeological party that Barnett had described. To make it even better, Anderson, a former police officer was able to provide an identi-kit sketch of Buskirk so that we would know the man if we could somehow locate him.
Tom Carey, who had studied anthropology as an undergraduate and as a graduate student began a search for Dr. Buskirk. Almost the first thing he did was find a reference to Dr. Winfred Buskirk who had written a book about the western Apache. Carey wrote for a copy of the dust jacket and received one. The picture of Buskirk matched, to a surprising degree that of the sketch that Anderson had supplied. Carey had found Anderson’s Buskirk.
Buskirk, when interviewed a few weeks later, said that in the summer of 1947 he had been on the Apache reservation in Arizona, but wasn’t all that far from the Plains. Buskirk said, however, he had not been involved in any of this because he had been too busy doing his research. Or as he said, he was too busy to engage in any archaeological sideshows.