To be fair, the timing of her story and the location, only twenty miles from Roswell and north of the Pine Lodge Road doesn’t fit with other information that has been developed. That she and her husband were there, in the late afternoon and prior to the arrival of the military doesn’t really work either. She made it clear that they had gone to a ranch house to call the military. However, she did the best she could to answer the questions and seemed sincere in what she said.
She did say that they had talked to a colonel, but then her husband had a habit of calling any military man “colonel.” She said that they had been cautioned not to talk about what they had seen, but it seemed to have been more of a request than it had been an order. Certainly, she didn’t perceive it as a threat. Just a suggestion they not mention it to anyone else.
She didn’t seem surprised by the reaction of the “colonel” either. He seemed to be aware of the situation, as if this was not the first such site that he had visited. This suggests that there might have been more than a single site where bodies were found, which does fit with information being developed today.
Martin Jorgenson
Martin Jorgenson walked into the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell and mentioned, off-hand, casually, that he had been around Roswell in 1947. Don Burleson, a Roswell resident, happened to be in the museum at the time and, according to Burleson, “[I] tackled the guy (almost literally).
Sometimes called “Tex” by researchers, Jorenson said that he was a civilian working for the military and that he, along with his colleagues, stumbled onto the site while searching for a drone jet aircraft that had been tested on July 3 but that had crashed somewhere near Roswell. He, along with several NCOs had been told to find it.
As they neared the site, Jorgenson said that he saw pieces of bright silver metal. The metal appeared to be very light and later he would learn quite hard. He said that he saw some sort of writing, that is “hieroglyphics” on it.
The craft, he said, was stubby with curved-back wings. It was a small object, about twenty feet long and only about 12 to 14 feet wide. It had the look of some of the rocket ships in the old Buck Rogers serials.
There were three creatures. One was dead, one, though alive, was slumped over and the third was standing in the canopy looking at the men. They were all small, with a grayish, greenish skin, and dark slanted eyes. They had large heads and small noses.
Unlike Willmon, but like others, Jorgenson said they were wearing uniforms, or what might have been uniforms, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t notice their hands or their feet.
Jorgenson said that he left the site shortly after the recovery began. He returned to the base and there he was warned not to talk about what he had seen. He said that he had to sign some kind of an oath or a non-disclosure agreement. He thought, by the time he said anything to Burleson and others, that the agreement had expired.
There is one real concern about this story. Jorgenson said that he was assigned to the base where this jet drone project was located and it was a test flight that went astray. There are no records to corroborate this. And his discussion of using radar to track it is also a worry, given the nature of the terrain and the locations of the various radars in 1947. Had this test gone astray from White Sands Proving Grounds or from Alamogordo Army Air Field, the radars there wouldn’t have been able to track it much below 10,000 feet, which meant it could have crashed almost anywhere. The search probably would have been conducted by aircraft and not guys in a jeep.
Thomas Gonzales
Another first-hand witness who can provide little in the way of corroboration is Thomas Gonzales, a sergeant who told John Price and Don Ecker that he had seen the bodies of the alien creatures. Like so many of the others, Gonzales was not a member of the Military Police or any other of the law enforcement units assigned to the base. He was a sergeant in the transportation section, but, as Bean mentioned, they had swept through the base looking for all available men. Gonzales was one of those.
Skeptics, in fact, have made much of the fact that some of these witnesses were not assigned to either the security or military police units on the base. But then, Bean said, the sergeants had come through looking for anyone they could impress into service. Such things have happened before in the Army and it fits with the general concept that every soldier has basic training that would allow him (or in today’s world, her) to be used in a variety of ways, as the situation dictated. All basic trainees learn how to stand a proper guard.
Gonzales described the craft as looking more like an airfoil than it did like a saucer. He said that the bodies were like “little men” but not like the “greys” of the more recent abduction literature.
Gonzales, when I interviewed him, was reluctant to talk and I fear that my style in this particular interview was more forceful than it needed to be. I was attempting to verify his credentials, though his picture in the Roswell Yearbook certainly put him at the base at the right time. And I wanted to make sure that the information that I had was correct. It had been filtered a couple of times, and sometimes during the passing of information, it becomes distorted. That didn’t seem to be the case here.
Unfortunately, Gonzales was not an articulate man, and when I talked to him a dozen years ago, he was 78. His son said that his father had been telling the story for years, long before the information about Roswell became well known. Like Beverly Bean and her sister Harriet Kercher, Gonzales’ son verified a date in the 1960s as being one of the first times he’d heard his father mention the Roswell case.
Gonzales also mentioned that he had trouble with the military after he was involved there. He suggested he was transferred quickly and in the process, lost some personal property. The rumor is that many of those involved were quickly transferred from the base. However, the unit history provides information about transfers into and out of the 509th. The records seem to indicate that there was not an appreciable increase in transfers in July or August. The numbers remained consistent with those of earlier months. This does not mean, however, that specific people weren’t transferred out.
The Military Police at Roswell
There are some former members of the military police at Roswell who have come forward with stories about the crash and the alien creatures. One such man I’ll call Sergeant Johnson which is his real name, but since Johnson is the second most common last name in the United States and since his picture does not appear in the Yearbook, it will be difficult to trace him. I will say that I am in possession of records, obtained through the Army (or I probably should say here that John Carpenter obtained directly from the Army)that show SGT Johnson was stationed at Roswell at the proper time, and that he was a member of the 1395th MP Company, though he was not a sergeant then.
Johnson was the acting corporal of the guard when they received a telephone call that said there was a crash up near Corona. Johnson was told to take a detail of four men but ended up taking about a dozen to secure the site. They drove to Corona, talked to the police and a few people to get directions and then drove out to the crash site. Johnson said that the craft had impacted and was standing at a twenty to thirty degree angle from the ground. He said, sort of confirming what Anna Willmon said, that the craft was about twelve to fourteen feet in diameter and that it was very light, no more than half a ton or maybe 1200 pounds. Reflecting on it, he now suspects the craft was made of some kind of composite material.