Where does all this leave us? The best tales told about Roswell, those that brought in alien bodies in a first-hand sense, have since been shown to be faked. Kaufmann, Anderson, Dennis and Ragsdale who said they had seen the bodies or in Dennis’s case, a drawing of them, were later discovered to have invented their Roswell connections.
Not only has this left a hole in the Roswell case, but it provides the skeptics with the ammunition to sink the whole report. They can point to the testimony of any of these men and say, “See, they were making it up and they fooled you.”
The response will be that we, who have investigated the Roswell case were the ones to expose these reports for what they were. The skeptics stood on the sidelines without having to get their hands dirty. So, yes, these men have been exposed, but remember who did the work to expose them.
Chapter Eight: The Skeptical Side of the Fence
One thing I have noticed about most books dealing with UFOs is that the author takes one position and then sticks to it. Rather than present a scientific analysis of the evidence, the writers treat it more like a debate. That is, they might be well aware of evidence that does not support their point of view, so they ignore it hoping that the opponent, or in this case, the reader, doesn’t know about.
There is nothing wrong with that approach, but I have always thought it best to present both sides of the argument so that the reader, intelligence person that he or she is, can make a more informed opinion about the subject. I try to leave it to the reader to accept or reject that data. For this reason, my writings about UFOs have sometimes been called schizophrenic.
This is why the skeptical community is aware of Curry Holden’s wife’s opinion of what he told me in Lubbock a number of years ago. I was the one who reported that she had told me that her husband, because of his advanced age (he was 96 when I spoke to him) sometime confused events in his mind and that was why she was unimpressed with the fact he had confirmed the UFO crash and the alien bodies. She was sure he was confused.
I, on the other hand, am not so sure. He seemed quite lucid when I spoke to him, and I was aware of the mental confusion that can be created by a close questioning of an elderly man. I tried to approach it carefully and I tried not to give any hint as to what I wanted to know or a direction I hoped the conversation would take. In fact, I tried to approach it from the negative so that if he was picking up cues from me, it would lead him in the wrong direction.
For those keeping score, Holden told me that he was there in Roswell and he had seen it all. He would suggest, or rather others would suggest, it was like a crashed airplane with stubby wings. The site was nearly due north of Roswell. But Holden couldn’t really provide details and my interview with him was short, while his wife sat there, not too happy with me.
I had tried to find documentation because Holden’s papers were stored at the library on the Texas Tech campus. The best I could do was learn that he had been to a wedding and had paid a bill around the time, but given the distances involved and the timing of that information, he was not excluded as a witness. He could have made a short research trip into New Mexico in the right time frame. A solid conclusion, one way or the other simply wasn’t possible.
The point is, however, that we need to look at some of the negative information that has been discovered about the Roswell case. This doesn’t mean we’ll again expose the witnesses to the negative aspects of their claims, or suggest why I don’t, and others don’t believe some of the most incredible testimony. I mean, it really doesn’t do much good to say, again, that documents found after Frank Kaufmann died suggest that he had invented a great deal of the testimony he offered on Roswell.
No, the point here is to take a look at the documentation that has been discovered and see what it says about the Roswell case. This would be documentation created before there were worries about the Freedom of Information Act so that those writing the documents wouldn’t expect them to be seen by the public. This, I believe, means that those creating the documents were writing for a specific audience and would not have been as careful in the choice of their wording and phrasing as those in today’s world might be. In other words, I think we would be getting some unvarnished truth here, and those of us who believe the evidence points to an alien spacecraft crash at Roswell need to see some of the evidence from the other side.
And, no, I’m not going to go through any more of the MJ-12 nonsense than I already have. It will live or die with what is out there, and the arguments have all been made in many different forums. I’ve been quite clear that I do not accept the MJ-12 documents as authentic, though to do so would help strengthen the Roswell case. I’m more interested in the evidence than I am in embracing something that I know to be fake.
Today I want to look at the documents created in the right time frame and that we KNOW are authentic because of where they were found, who found them, and what they reflect. In other words, we’ll look at the evidence that suggests something other than alien answers the Roswell question.
The Twining Letter
Back in September 1947, Nathan Twining, then the commanding general of the Air Materiel Command, signed a document created in his name (I word it this way because I seriously doubt that LTG Twining sat down and wrote this… I’m sure his staff created it and he signed his name when he was satisfied with the contents), that said, near the beginning, “It is the opinion that… The phenomenon [flying saucers] reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious… There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc… appear man-made aircraft.”
Pretty impressive when considered that this was from a highranking military officer who would become the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He was saying in this document, classified secret, that he believed the flying saucers were real, that they were intelligently controlled and they probably weren’t American.
So we have a man who said that the saucers were real, and who, given who he was, would have known about the Roswell crash, had it happened. Everything we learned about it suggested the debris, and the bodies, were taken to Wright Field where the headquarters of the Air Materiel Command were located, for analysis. In fact, it would be Twining’s people who did the analysis of that debris and who would have coordinated the examination of the biological samples, that is, the bodies.
That it why, near the end of the letter, where he (or his staff) wrote, “The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects” is disturbing. If there had been a crash, Twining would have known about it, yet here, in September 1947, about ten or eleven weeks after the Roswell crash, Twining was denying there had been any crash recovered debris.
It would be nice if everything in the UFO field was cut and dried, but it isn’t. This letter, sent to Brigadier General George Schulgen was only classified as secret and because of that, nothing in it would be classified higher. If, for example, they had wanted to include a single sentence that was classified top secret, then the whole document would have to be classified at the higher level. That it was only secret the document could contain nothing that was top secret.
What this means is that it could include nothing about the Roswell crash, if it happened because such information would be top secret. This provides some “wiggle room” for those of us who believe the Roswell crash happened because Twining, to answer the questions put to him about the nature of UFOs, could accomplish the creation of a program to study them without having to admit that something had fallen at Roswell.