Roswell

Today, July 7th, marks the 61st anniversary of the "Roswell UFO incident" that put Roswell, New Mexico on the map. On the forty-second page of “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe” former deputy assistant secretary of defense Karl T. Pflock wrote (hyperlinks & emphasis added):

something went down just north of Roswell." When the "flare" faded, the unknown had dropped off the radars, and Kaufmann told me, "We knew it was down."³

The "Campers"

According to the late Jim Ragsdale, he and a married lady friend, "Trudy Truelove," also deceased, saw the mysterious bogey fall from the sky.⁴ In the first version of his story, Ragsdale claimed he and Truelove were taking advantage of the rare three-day weekend as well as the absence of Truelove's husband, an enlisted man stationed at Roswell AAF. They were lounging "buck naked" and drinking beer in the bed of Ragsdale's pickup truck at a remote spot about forty road miles north of Roswell. Their trysting place was a location he said he knew about because of his work as part of a team surveying the route for a soon to be constructed El Paso Natural Gas Company pipeline.⁵

In a 1993 interview with Schmitt, Ragsdale said, "On a night during July, 1947, ... during a severe lightning storm ... [we] observed a bright flash and what appeared to be a bright light source moving toward the southeast."⁶ Randle and Schmitt reported that Ragsdale, while unsure of the exact date, was certain this event took place during the long Fourth of July weekend.⁷

Ragsdale and Truelove watched and heard the object roar overhead and apparently strike the ground "a mile or two" from their location.⁸ "Later, at sunrise, driving in that direction, ... [we] came upon a ravine near a bluff that was covered with pieces of unusual wreckage, remains of a damaged craft and a number of smaller bodied beings outside the craft." Ragsdale collected some of the strange debris, which by his description was similar to that found by Mack Brazel. He began putting the material in his vehicle, but Truelove, frightened and anxious to leave, threw it out almost as fast as he loaded it.⁹

According to Ragsdale, the lady seems to have had good reason to be concerned. He claimed "a military convoy arrived and secured the scene. As a result of the convoy's appearance we quickly fled the area."¹⁰

Farmer and Son, Corporal, and Nuns

Randle and Schmitt suggest William Woody and his father, on their farm south of Roswell, observed the same object seen by the campers rather than that seen by Wilmots on July 2. According to them, the younger Woody reports seeing a flaming object "coming from the northwest and going down about due north of Roswell," that is, exactly opposite the direction and track reported by the Wilmots, but consistent with Ragsdale's alleged recollections.¹¹ Moreover, they assert, Woody's description of the object he and his father saw much more closely matches what Ragsdale claimed to have seen—a flaming something streaking across the sky—than it does the Wilmot UFO.¹²

Then there is the account of E. L. Pyles who, as an army air forces corporal in 1947, was assigned to a radio-range facility some miles southwest of Roswell AAF. According to Randle and Schmitt, on a night "early in July of 1947," Pyles was at the

More information about “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe” (and the book itself) is available from:

• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble
• Powell's Books

(Prometheus Books, June 2001. Hardcover, 345 pages. ISBN: 1573928941; EAN: 9781573928946.)