Some investigators believed that Buskirk was lying about that because he held a reserve commission in the military. They believed that he was covering up the truth for the Army.
Buskirk, however, was quite open and answered all the questions I put to him. The question became, if Anderson hadn’t seen him on the Plains in July 1947, how would he be able to identify him. Anderson couldn’t have just pulled a name out of a hat and learned later that the man had been an anthropologist who was in the right region of the world at the time. There had to be a connection.
Buskirk himself, intrigued by the question, did some research of his own. Anderson, it seemed, had attended the Albuquerque High School where Buskirk taught a course in Anthropology. Anderson had merely identified his old high school teacher probably believing that Buskirk would be unavailable for interviews.
Transcripts from the high school and reviewed by Buskirk, showed that Anderson had taken the Anthropology class one semester and then transferred to French. That produced a connection outside of the Plains. What are the odds that Anderson and Buskirk would find themselves in the same high school?
There was another interesting aspect to this. The picture of Buskirk that Anderson supplied was clearly Buskirk as he appeared when Anderson would have known him as a teacher. Buskirk, in 1947, was a much slimmer man with a narrow face. Ten years later he had put on weight and had a much rounder face.
To complicate matters, Anderson began claiming that he and I had spoken for only 26 minutes on the telephone during our initial and only interview. I don’t know why this point was important to Anderson. He insisted it was true and he supplied his telephone bill to prove it.
My tape of the conversation ran to nearly an hour. I was able to get a copy of the telephone bill that Anderson supplied to one researcher proving he had talked to me for only 26 minutes, and a copy of the appropriate page from the telephone company. On the surface they looked the same, but in the end it was clear that Anderson had created the one with the 26 minutes on it. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted that he had forged the telephone bill to make me look bad. It was just one more proof that his story couldn’t be trusted.
In the end, Anderson’s tale did not support that of Barney Barnett because Anderson claimed to have been on the Plains on the wrong day. A diary kept by Barnett’s wife proved that Barnett was in Socorro on the day Anderson claimed to have seen him near the crashed flying saucer. Lest you think Anderson just misremembered the date, Anderson also had a diary. The dates were in conflict. Of course we had a source for the Barnett diary but the Anderson diary came from a conveniently unavailable aunt.
To make matters worse for Anderson, he had claimed to have been a SEAL during his Navy service in the 1960s. The SEALs, however, said they could find no record that he had trained with them or served with them. Anderson found himself on their “Wall of Shame” which named those who had claimed to be SEALs, but who had invented their affiliation with them.
Jim Ragsdale
On January 26, 1993, Jim Ragsdale told UFO researchers, for the first time, in some detail, how he had witnessed the crash of an alien spacecraft in July 1947, how he had watched the military begin the recovery operation, and how he, with a female companion, originally identified as Trudy Truelove, had picked up pieces of the strange metallic debris.
Don Schmitt had arranged to meet with Ragsdale and his wife at their home to discuss the story and he recorded the interview on audio tape. Schmitt sat down with Ragsdale, who, at the time was on oxygen due to his poor health. Schmitt had brought maps and photographs hoping that Ragsdale would be able to locate the crash site and confirm some of the information that had been developed over the last several months.After an inquiry about Ragsdale’s health, the interview began, Ragsdale said,“Hell, when it came down you couldn't really tell what it was… what you could still see, where it hit. I think it was two spaceships flying together and one of them came down and the other one picked up what they could and got out of there."
Ragsdale then said, "But it was either dummies or bodies or something there. They looked like bodies. They weren't very long… over four or five foot long at most. We didn't see their faces or nothing like that there, but we had just got to the site and we heard the Army, the sirens and stuff all coming and we got into the damn jeep and taking off. We had to hold a fence up and go up under the damn fence onto another ranch to come out from there."
Ragsdale and his female companion returned to the impact site the next morning. They heard the military arriving on the scene. He said, "Oh… it must have been… it was two or three six by six Army trucks, a wrecker and everything… and leading the pack was a '47 Ford car with guys in it… MPs and stuff…"
The interview was hard to follow because it seemed to be all over the map. A direct question about some aspect of the UFO crash was twisted until the talk was of something else. Ragsdale and his wife seemed to have their own agenda and attempted to direct the flow of the conversation. Only occasionally was it brought back to the UFO crash.
On April 24, 1993, I spoke to Ragsdale again because there were some points that needed to be clarified. For example, if he had witnessed the crash of what Ragsdale thought, at first, was some kind of government experimental craft, why hadn't he reported it to the sheriff or the military that night. Lives could be at stake.
Ragsdale said he had been drinking that night, and that he was out in the desert with another man's wife. Neither of them were supposed to be where they were. Besides, they couldn't see much that night. It wasn't until daylight that he had enough light to see the craft and the bodies. It wasn’t until daylight that he knew something had actually been wrecked.
There were, according to Ragsdale, "Small people there. Three or four bodies."
After arranging a financial deal with the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, Ragsdale radically changed his story. Now, according to him, the object passed through the trees to impact less than a hundred yards from where his truck had been parked. Ragsdale and his friend took flashlights and walked over, spending "considerable time looking around."
Now, rather than seeing bodies or dummies in the distance, Ragsdale was close enough to touch them. They were dressed in silver uniforms and wore a tight helmets. Ragsdale now claimed that he tried to remove one of the helmets but couldn't. The eyes, according to Ragsdale, were large and oval and didn't resemble anything human. Later still he would suggest that the skin of the dead alien beings was gray. The craft, according to Ragsdale, was about twenty feet in diameter, and had a dome in the middle.
In this interview Ragsdale said that it wasn't too long before they heard what they believed were trucks and heavy equipment coming. "We left and were not there when whatever it was arrived." This is, of course, in direct conflict with all the detailed descriptions offered by Ragsdale in earlier interviews.
Describing how to find the impact site, Ragsdale now said, "A sign post on the Pine Lodge Road indicates '53 miles to Roswell.' Near this sign is a road going south toward Pine Lodge… and the turn off to Arabella leads east and south. Two or 3 miles down this road towards Arabella is the site of our pickup that night and nearby is the impact site."
The discrepancies that have appeared are more than the minor changes expected as someone tries to remember events in the distant past. Researchers expect a story to shift with each telling simply because of the mechanism of memory, but these changes go beyond that. Ragsdale first reported seeing the bodies in the distance and then, in his second, more dramatic version claimed he tried to pull a helmet off one. He originally provided a vague description of the alien and then gave one that seems to match those given by people claiming to be abducted by aliens. Ragsdale said he watched the arrival of the military and described the convoy and later claimed to have left before the trucks were in view. Originally he said the crash site was thirty to forty miles north of Roswell to one that is now claimed to be sixty or seventy miles away.