What this tells us here is that rumors and stories of experiments preexisted the revelations of Redfern. In fact, I had told many people that if I could find evidence of an experiment, preferably illegal, which had resulted in the deaths of human subjects, that would be a much bigger story, at least in terms of what the journalistic community was willing to believe. Too many reject the idea of an alien spacecraft crash out of hand. But discover, and prove, some sort of underhanded experiment by the government and nearly everyone would jump on board.
The problem for me was the lack of anything substantial. The records that I had examined at White Sands, in Alamogordo, at the National Archives, at the Southwest History Museum in Roswell, at the universities and government offices in Albuquerque and Santa Fe revealed nothing to lead in that direction.
Then there was the debris described by the witnesses including Jesse Marcel, Sr.; Bill Brazel, son of Mack; Loretta Proctor, and Sallye Tadolini, whose mother, Marian Strickland, had been a neighbor of the Brazels in the summer of 1947. If we stuck to these descriptions, then a terrestrially manufactured machine, even an experimental craft, seems less likely.
In an interview conducted in February 1989, Bill Brazel told me about the exotic debris he had found on the ranch. He said, "The only reason I noticed the foil was that I picked this stuff up and put it in my chaps pocket. I had it in there, two, three days and when I took it out and put it in the box I happened to notice that it started unfolding and flattened out… I would crease it and lay it down and watch it.”
He also described a small piece of debris as light as balsa wood but that was incredibly strong. He said, "The piece I found was a jagged piece." He said that he tried to whittle on it, but couldn’t even get a sliver, suggesting something much tougher than anything used in a balloon.
He mentioned something like fiber optics. He said, "Now there’s this plastic they put a light down one end and it transfers the light down that thing and come out the end."
None of the items, as he described them, other than the fiber optics, appears in today’s world. It is as if we haven’t figured out the secrets of them.
He did say that his father, Mack, had told him, "That looks like some of the contraption I found." That statement, of course, connected the strange debris, which didn’t resemble either a weather balloon or the pieces of a Horton brothers flying wing, ties the strange material found by Bill to the descriptions of the others such as Jesse Marcel.
Sallye Strickland Tadolini was a young girl in 1947. Bill Brazel, about a decade older, showed up at the Strickland New Mexican ranch house a few days after the crash. He had the strange foil with him and let the others have a look at it and play with it.
Tadolini, in an affidavit for the Fund for UFO Research described it this way. "What Bill showed us was a piece of what I still think of as fabric. It was something like aluminum foil, something like satin, something like well-tanned leather in its toughness, yet it was not precisely like any one of those materials. While I do not recall this with certainty, I think the fabric measured about four by eight or ten inches. … Bill passed it around and we all felt of it. I did a lot of sewing, so the feel of it made a great impression on me. It felt like no fabric I have ever touched before or since. It was very silky or satiny, with the same texture on both sides. Yet when I crumpled it in my hands, thefeel was like that you notice when you crumple a leather glove in your hand. When it was released, it sprang back into its original shape, quickly flattening out with no wrinkles. I did this several times, as did the others."
The others told similar stories of the material. Loretta Procter said they tried to burn a small piece,about the size of a pencil and failed. Jesse Marcel, Sr. said they hit a larger, metallic piece with a sledgehammer without doing any damage or marking the metal.
What this really means is that there is a body of first hand testimony that suggests the debris found near Roswell was something extraordinary. The elements, the foil that would return to its original shape without sign of a wrinkle or crease, the extraordinarily tough metal that was as light as balsa but so strong that it wouldn’t cut or break like ordinary metals, and some something that sounded suspiciously like fiber optics at a time when no such thing existed on Earth, all suggested something extraterrestrial.
Redfern’s theory hinges on the integrity of his anonymous, but alleged first-hand witnesses. Once, five or six years ago there were a number to stories told by alleged first-hand witnesses about themselves, what they had seen, and about alien bodies. Frank Kaufmann talked in detail about these things, as did Gerald Anderson, Jim Ragsdale and Glenn Dennis. Kaufmann offered copies of official documents to prove who he was. He had a letter that if authenticated, proved Roswell has been a spaceship crash.
Redfern, in an interview conducted for UFO Review (found at http://www.uforeview.net) said that the witnesses he refused to name had proven who they were by documents in their possession. To Redfern, this is proof that they are who they claim to be and that their tales can be trusted.
Yet the same can be said of Kaufmann. His documents looked authentic, and were, after a fashion. Only after the originals were found, could we see the alterations he had made to the copies he had given us. He’d used whiteout and a copy machine to forge documents to support his claims. It should be noted that unless the original document is available for scrutiny, documents are of little value. As Frank Kaufmann said, "The Xerox is as loose as a goose." He meant that it was simple to forge documents in the modern age.
Interestingly, in Redfern’s book, he uses some of the Kaufmann testimony to bolster his case, seemingly unaware that Kaufmann invented his role in Roswell. If Kaufmann made up everything and had no role in the Roswell case, then where does that leave Redfern? He used Kaufmann's description of the craft suggesting it was authentic to bolster his Horton brothers flying wing theory. Since we know that Kaufmann was inventing his tale, that testimony does nothing to support Redfern’s theory, and, in fact, detracts from it.
So, if Redfern is wrong, and this wasn’t some kind of horrendous and illegal experiment, what is the answer? It’s the same as it has been for the last two decades. It was extraterrestrial.
Redfern has even suggested that his answer makes sense because he can find no documentation to support it. He reasons, with some logic, those conducting the experiments, knowing that they were illegal, destroyed the evidence when they finished. The files were shredded, the remains of the craft were dismantled and burned and those with knowledge were cautioned to never mention it to anyone at any time.
Redfern tells us that an extraterrestrial craft would not lend itself to such a cover up. Because the biological samples, meaning the alien bodies, were unique and because the craft and its components were unique, they would be preserved so that information could be gathered from it as our technology advanced.
And, it would seem that he would be right. Logic argued in favor of his scenario. Destruction of everything related to the case if it was an illegal experiment and preservation of everything if it was extraterrestrial.
But there are other aspects of this that do take us in the direction of the extraterrestrial. First, is the credible eyewitness testimony about the surprising and the unusual characteristics of the various types of material recovered on the field northwest of Roswell. Clearly, these were things that were beyond the technology of the times and, in fact, some of them are beyond our technology today.