In a video-taped interview conducted in England on January 4, 1991, Bean said, “Dad used to tell us this story and he didn’t tell us often.”
He told his daughter, according to what she said on tape, that he “had to go out into the desert. All available men were grabbed and they all went out into the desert in trucks where a crashed saucer had come down.”
Brown and another soldier whose name he never gave to his daughter, were pulled aside for guard duty. They were told not to look under the tarp in the truck, but Bean said, laughing, that the minute someone tells you that, the first thing you do is take a look. She said that he dad told her, “He and this other guy lifted up the tarpaulin or something…”
She said that she and her sister now argue about the number of alien creatures under the tarp. Bean says it was two, but her sister insists that it was three. No matter now. The point is that Brown described the creatures for them.
According to her, “He said they were smaller than us, not more than four foot tall… much larger heads than we have. Slanted eyes and [the skin was] yellowish.”
Bean wondered if he had been scared but he said that he wasn’t. He thought they had nice faces and they looked as if they would have been friendly. According to Bean, he repeated that as often as he told the story, which, over the years was fewer than a dozen times.
Bean, of course, sometimes pestered him for more information. After the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in 1977, she asked him about the movie and how authentic it might be. He said that it was the biggest load of crap he’d ever seen and not like the real thing at all. When she tried to learn more, he told her, “That’s all I can tell you. I can’t tell you anymore.”
The late Karl Pflock, in his book, Roswell, Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, complained that Bean’s story was second hand and that neither her sister nor her mother would comment on it. Pflock had to know that both the mother and the other daughter had confirmed the tale because he had access to the video tapes of those 1991 interviews. He is right about this being a tale told by the daughters and wife of the man who lived it. There is nothing that can be done about that. By the time his name surfaced in the investigation, he had died from complications of various lung diseases, but it is not true that his wife or other daughter refused to talk.
Ada Brown added little to the complex tale told by Beverly Bean when she was interviewed on video tape in 1991. She merely confirmed that she too had heard about the crash over the years and that it was something from another world. She seemed a little uncomfortable sharing a secret left by her husband.
Bean’s sister, Harriet Kercher, on January 4, 1991, was also interviewed on video tape. She had heard her father tell his tales a couple of times when Beverly was there, but there was one incident when Beverly was absent and her father gave her just a little more information.
Kercher, in her early teens said that she was with friends when she saw something flash by. Her friends saw it too, and then, in the distance, that something reappeared and seemed to be coming at them. Kercher said they were frightened by that shiny object but they weren’t far from her house so they ran there, slamming the door behind them.
Her father met them and asked them why they seemed to be in such a panic. Kercher said that her father, after hearing the tale of the shining object, told her, “It’s nothing to be frightened about.”
The friends didn’t understand, exactly, what he meant and he told them about the crashed flying saucer, saying that there were a few bodies on it. He provided few new details. He just made it clear that there was something about the creatures that suggested to him that they were not to be feared.
But, as Pflock said, these were second-hand reports and they could be the misinterpretation of the original story. If the witness saw anything it all, it was minor, such as Frankie Rowe seeing the piece of metallic debris that seemed to be something from another technology but might have been misunderstood by a twelve-year-old girl recovering from dental surgery. It is not proof, or even a suggestion of proof of something extraterrestrial.
First-Hand Witnesses
There are, however, some who have told first-hand stories and who were clearly in Roswell at the time of the UFO crash. One of those is Anna Willmon, who I met a number of years ago, just about a year or so before her death. She was a nice woman whose memory was not as sharp as it once had been. She remembered some details of her encounter with the Roswell crash, but some of her memories are at odds with what others recalled. The passage of time might have colored her memories as to exact details, but her story fits into, generally, the whole of the Roswell case.
She told me, during both a telephone and later a video-taped interview, that she had been in the Capitan Mountains west of Roswell with her first husband, W. I. Witcamp. As they returned from a long morning of work at a saw mill, they saw something shining off the highway and stopped to look for it. They were about twenty miles from Roswell along what is known as the Pine Lodge Road.
Together she and her husband moved through the brush until they came to an object shaped like an overturned washtub, which means that it was circular, or to stretch the point, saucer-like. She didn’t think it was very large, maybe twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. She did see bodies of the flight crew, or “little guys” as she called them.
She said that the surface of the craft was very shiny, almost mirror-like. It was in two pieces. One of them sat up on four short, stubby legs and the other, looking as it if had been knocked from the top in the crash, was sitting a short distance away. She insisted on calling it a flying saucer and said that her husband had called it that repeatedly.
She didn’t see much of the creatures because as she approached one, with the thought of turning it over, her husband stopped her. He was afraid of radiation or maybe disease. He didn’t want her to touch them, or the remains of the craft.
She said that there were two bodies. One lying face down in the dirt and the other in the shade of some cedar trees, as if he had crawled over there before he died. She did say the skin looked like burnt rubber. It was a grayish-brown, she said, that was hard to define.
She said, “…that other one was laying up kinda towards this brush and the other was out back… like he had been flung out of the thing. And this other little guy looked like he’d got out and went off and laid down… And he wasn’t very big. He was about as big as a little five year old kid. A little one.”
She said that one of them was slim, skinny, with short arms and little hands and feet. The other one, the one she thought might have survived the crash only to die a little later, was chubby. His arms were short and his feet looked like human feet. His skin tones matched those of the other. The only real difference was that he was heavier than his fellow.
She said that they were dressed the same. They worn green shorts and nothing else. She could see their backs and said that they looked normal. The skin was rubber-like. But she made it clear that these were small creatures. She mentioned that repeatedly.
She kept no diary and wrote no letters that mentioned the incident. Those she knew in 1947, who might be able to corroborate what she had seen were, in 1994, long dead. All she had now, was a tale that fit, generally, into the scheme of things told be other witnesses and like so many of those, she had no way to verify the information and no proof for what she said.