Crash-site confusion: How a once-official site is deemed "alleged"
2/19/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
If there.s one thing that the AlienZoo ambassadorial crew didn't quite figure out while in Roswell, it.s the issue of crash sites. We went to two. One is the Ragsdale site, where James Ragsdale supposedly saw a flickering craft smash into the rocks of Boy Scout Mountain, slightly more than 50 miles west of Roswell. The other is the Corn site, a wall of rock with a mysterious gap in it, located 23 miles northwest of Roswell.
I.ll speak for myself: I still don.t know where the Roswell UFO crashed. There.s comparatively little doubt that Corona is the debris field, that the UFO skidded there and landed somewhere to the south. But where? I . along with Zookeeper and Blobbert . spent three days, at that, trying to figure things out.
The International UFO Museum and Research Center insists that an extraterrestrial craft landed at the Ragsdale site. An escorted tour to the Capitan Mountains can be easily arranged through the museum. We were encouraged to pay what we thought the trip was worth; considering the trip is one hour in each direction, we plunked down $75.
Meantime, Corn purchased his land in the 1970s without knowing about the crash, .like the man who bought a cow and got a calf as well,. as Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle term it in Beyond Roswell. The book retells how Corn met a man who matched his farm with Air Force photos of a rocky ridge. Indeed, the wall of rock on the farmer.s site has an indentation on it, like a heel-shaped craft struck it. For a long time, Corn arranged by-appointment tours of the crash area, at a cost of $15 per person.
The ride up to "Ragsdale"
What does a crash site look like? Well, you.ll see rocks. And trees. And dirt. But no spacecraft. The UFO is long gone. But driving to a crash site is exciting. It makes you feel like you.re on a hunt for something, like maybe, just maybe, the spaceship will reappear, in all of its wrecked inscrutability.
A kind, gentle, elder gentleman named Bruce, bedecked head-to-toe in plaid, was our guide to Boy Scout Mountain. He grew up in Roswell. He was in high school when the crash happened. We drove in his 4x4 Suburban through the flowing plains of southeastern New Mexico, toward the Capitan Mountains, elevation 6,200. We saw elk. The further up the mountain we traveled, the more ponderosa and juniper pines we saw. It was breathtaking. Literally.
Ragsdale didn.t become an officially sanctioned site until 1995 . days before James Ragsdale.s death . when he signed an affidavit stating the location of the crash: .2 or 3 miles down this road towards Arabella is the site of our pickup that night and nearby the impact site. This area is near the mountain indicated as Boy Scout Mountain..
As the story goes, at 11:30 p.m. of July 4, 1947, Ragsdale was enjoying a tender moment, if you will, with a married woman (someone else.s wife) outside Pine Lodge, where popular dances were held. Museum folks refer to this woman as .Trudy Truelove,. for lack of a better name. Anyway, the day after witnessing the crash of the flashing light, Ragsdale and friend picked up some of the crash debris, but decided to leave the scene after they heard military vehicles coming. In Roswell, days later, Ragsdale showed off the debris to his friends at the Blue Moon Night Club. His mistake, it turned out.
Ragsdale.s house was soon burglarized, but all that was stolen was a pistol and the debris. Further, Truelove was mysteriously killed in a car wreck . and until his death Ragsdale did not believe that the injuries she received were enough to kill her. And, he swore, someone tried to drive him off the road later in life. Ragsdale felt pursued. He feared for his life. He kept his story a secret. His story didn.t come to the surface until he was on his deathbed, when his children quizzed him on some issues, and videotaped the event.
Bruce, our guide, told us how highly ufologist Stanton Friedman - a nuclear physicist who is on the museum.s board of directors - ranks the Ragsdale story. .He.s been up here two or three times with me. And he seems more and more convinced every time I.ve visited with him that the Ragsdale story has some feasibility..
In our trip, we almost got to the rock. Yet, four-inch-deep snows kept us from making it all the way to the exact location of the crash. But we made it to the top of the highest hill, where I climbed up a radio tower, and took a couple of photos.
.Too many reliable people have seen evidence of a craft and bodies being here,. Bruce explained, as we stood amidst a quieting, ankle-deep blanket of wet snow. .Of course, the federal government has continued to cover it up, saying, .No, it didn.t happen. It was a weather balloon.. Every story they come up with has been proven unfeasible from the standpoint of almost everyone concerned . everyday citizens, much less the serious researchers who are engaged in this sort of thing..
Then we drove back. But I had to lose my tape recorder again, and panic to myself about it. Luckily, Blobbert let me share a Red Bull with him, so I calmed down.
In tribute to the aliens
Hub Corn is a very friendly, soft-spoken, unassuming guy. He.s an alfalfa farmer, and is said to be the largest property owner in the area. We met him one morning on the side of Interstate 285, 23 miles north of Roswell. He led us through the gate to his property in his white pickup. Seven miles of rocky trails later, we see it: two 30-foot-high monolithic rocks, erected to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Roswell Incident. A plaque near the base of the rocks reads, "We don't know who they were. We don.t know why they came. We only know they changed our view of the universe." In the distance: an indented wall of rock.
A pamphlet penned by Corn tells his story:
In early March, 1994, I noticed lots of traffic coming into my ranch North of Roswell. I would stop and question people as to their intentions and would only get vague answers (we.re just looking around and such.). . . . May 1994, I got a phone call from the International Museum. The informed me I am the property owner of the 1947 UFO Crash Site. . . . The maps were pulled out an the location marked and it is my property that they have located on the map. . . . Eyewitnesses had come forward due to Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt.s research [authors of the groundbreaking UFO Crash at Roswell]. The eyewitnesses had brought them to the same location at different times.
During the 50th anniversary celebration of the Roswell Incident, museum buses used to drive the trek out to Corn.s site. For tourists, at least, the trip seemed pretty official then. Today, still, a shed set a few hundred yards away from the chipped rock is filled with the trinkets that didn.t sell: alien earrings, necklaces, and postcards. And wasps. Nasty looking ones.
But something must have happened in the years since the anniversary. Corn told me that he and the museum squabbled access fees. Corn wasn.t about to haggle over the price he wanted for tours to run over his property. The museum balked, he says. The museum stopped sending buses Corn.s way. Today, Corn.s property is labeled an .alleged. site by maps in the museum.
Negative vibes aside, Corn enjoys showing people the crash site because, he feels, it gives people a reason to get out into the countryside. He.s not a ufologist, but he.s sympathetic to the UFO cause. He has taken time to search his area with a metal detector, but the best thing he could find was a shiny speck of some common mineral with a name that.s 12-inches long.
With almost deadpan delivery, he recounts how some people have brought flowers on the site, memorializing the alien casualties. Some start crying. Corn recounted how a psychic scanned the area, wandered around the rocks, and started screaming, but was unable to describe what she had found. Feeling the rocks, she started shaking.
.Some of them take it different ways than others,. Corn said of his visitors. .Some of them couldn.t care less. Some it affects quite a bit. So you.ve got to just play with the crowd, and see which way you.ve got to go..
(Blobbert thinks this quick anecdote should be retold, if for no other reason than the sake of randomness: There was a very heavy snow, and many local farmers couldn.t trudge through the snow to feed their animals. Corn remembers seeing massive explosions of snow, caused by massive hay bales being dropped by military cargo planes. Blobbert says, .Although I knew a UFO had crashed there, there wasn.t a UFO for me to see. Hearing this story from Hub, for me, amplified the folklore in the terrain.. Thanks, Blobbert.)
What we walked away with
I.m not alone in my conclusion that the Ragsdale site seems oddly commercialized . too official, perhaps . while the Corn site is very convincing. Since Roswell, I.ve learned that I.m not alone in my thoughts. In an interview, Cincinnati engineer Larry Young, who visited Roswell on a UFO fact-finding mission, remarked that he and friend Curt Robinson .found it too coincidental that the one museum sends its customers to a crash site located in a national forest where there is no issue with a land owner.. Ultimately, Young and Robinson wanted to call on Corn. I assume they found what they were looking for. We did.