The concluding sixth segment of AlienZoo's Roswell travel guide
3/4/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
In our last day in Roswell, the AlienZoo crew spent quality time with Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis . the two gentlemen who were directly involved in the Roswell Incident and, more than four decades later, helped start the International UFO Museum and Research Center (IUFOMRC). Haut, while a lieutenant at the Roswell Army Air Field.s 509th Bomb Group, on July 8, 1947 wrote the press release announcing the discovery of a .flying disc. that crashed west of Roswell. Dennis, meantime, is a career mortician, the man who on July 7, 1947 received a call from an airfield base officer who was looking for four-foot-long, hermetically sealed caskets.
There.s nothing like traveling hundreds of miles to meet with a couple of the keepers of Roswell.s ufological flame. Our visits couldn.t have been better.
Haut reflects on press release, recalls life at base
Lieutenant Walter Haut, the Roswell base.s information officer, was only 24 years old when he was asked by Colonel William Blanchard to write the press release that turned the universe upside-down. The statement basically revealed that the army had in its possession a crashed flying saucer. Blanchard merely dictated the announcement to Haut, who closely adhered to the phrasing that Blanchard used.
The younger officer typed the statement out and delivered it to local radio stations and newspapers. That evening, the Roswell Daily Record printed the story under the headline, .RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell,. and, in turn, the paper wired the news to the Associated Press. Before long, news of the Roswell Incident was on the doorsteps of the world.
.Colonel Blanchard was very honest about the whole thing,. Haut, now 77, told me. .He made a comment about the properties of this material. We didn.t talk much about it.
.Normally he would tell me anything he could. But in this instance he gave me some very short sentences that he felt the news media should have, which was, in essence, that we had in our possession a flying saucer..
The press release, as reproduced in Beyond Roswell, by Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle, reads as follows:
The intelligence office reports that it gained possession of the .dis:. [sic] through the cooperation of a Roswell rancher and Sheriff George Wilson of Roswell.
The disc landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher, whose name has not yet been obtained, stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the Roswell sheriff.s office.
The sheriff.s office in turn notified a major of the 509th intelligence office.
Action was taken immediately and the disc was picked up at the rancher.s home and taken to the Roswell air base. Following examination, the disc was flown by intelligence officers in a super-fortress to an undisclosed .higher headquarters..
The air base has refused to give details of construction of the disc or of its appearance.
Residents near the ranch on which the disc was found reported seeing a strange blue light several days ago about three o.clock in the morning.
There.s an irony about the wording of the release, and Haut admits it. The phrase .the disc was flown by intelligence officers. sounds as if the officers . such as Major Jesse Marcel, who was the first army officer to open up about Roswell, in the late 1970s . actually were flying the crashed craft. Haut reflects, .A bulk of the news media that called asked, .How did Major Marcel know how to fly this object?. And I had to explain to them that he put it on an airplane, and the airplane flew from Roswell to Ft. Worth..
While a B-29 bombardier in World War II, Chicago-born Haut flew 35 missions off of Saipan, in the Northern Mariana islands of the South Pacific. As he looks back on that time, Haut feels a sense of awe that he was involved in something as incredible as dropping 4,500-pound bombs on tiny islands. Before coming to Roswell, he was first trained as a navigator; Roswell turned him into a bombardier, as the Army was looking for soldiers who could handle both kinds of operations.
In the World War II era, the 509th Bomb Group was the only group in the country capable of carrying and dropping an atomic weapon. Security was so tight on the base that even Haut wasn.t permitted to get near a B-29 with nuclear-arms capacity. Everyone . even the most gung-ho soldier . was approached on a need-to-know basis.
.There were people who needed the information, and they had the information,. Haut says. .Those of us who were on the perimeter? No. We really didn.t need it..
Haut can.t imagine how the Roswell story will be handled in 50 or 100 years. All he can do, he insists, is keep telling his story straight. .I try to keep my story the same all the time. And keep it honest,. he admits. .I have no axe to grind in this whole thing..
Dennis and the mysterious phone calls
Glenn Dennis worked at Roswell.s Ballard Funeral Home when the flying disc crashed. A recent graduate from college, he was an apprentice mortician at the time, and his company had the contract to handle services for the base.
At 1:30 p.m. on July 7, 1947, an officer called Dennis asking how many hermetically sealed infant caskets he had in stock. Dennis wanted to know whether there was an accident, but was told that the coffin would be needed in case of emergency, as if the caller were planning for an unforeseen situation. Because Roswell was such a small town at the time . 13,000 residents . only one was in stock.
.How long would it take you to get more?. the caller inquired, according to Dennis.
.We can get all you want from Amarillo, Texas,. Dennis replied.
The phone rang an hour later. An officer wanted to know how a body that had been lying on the desert for some time could be best preserved, without chemically altering its composition. Dennis recommended freezing, and, when pressing to learn whether something happened, was told that the method would only be needed in eventuality . just in case, in other words.
.I don.t know who the hell you are, but you.re not a mortuary officer, because you would know the answer if you were,. Dennis said.
Later that day, Dennis drove to base to care for a wounded soldier. That.s when he encountered mysterious metal parts hanging outside of ambulance doors, and a nurse and captain adamantly urging him to leave the base immediately. The captain even warned Dennis that if he talked about what he saw, .somebody would be picking [his] bones out of the sand.. Dennis reminded the captain that he was a civilian, and the officer could .go to hell..
Weeks later, the nurse . a friend of Dennis.s . was killed in a plane crash.
.I didn.t tell this story until 1990,. Dennis says. .In the first place, I was in the funeral business. That.s not a normal occupation, as you know. I didn.t want to embarrass Roswell. I didn.t want to embarrass the funeral home. I didn.t want to embarrass my family..
Dennis decided to reveal the details of his involvement with the Roswell Incident after he retired from his work as a mortician. Life got a little boring, as he puts it. So he sat down one day and made the resolution that he would talk about his past, but attempt to organize a UFO research center.
.I.m not sure whether we did Roswell a favor, but it.s too late now,. he says with a smile.
Dennis, a loyal family man, still serves as chairman of the museum.s board. He says he still sticks to the truth, for it.s all he knows; he doesn.t change his story.
Don Burleson: The museum.s UFO research director
As director of research for the IUFOMRC, Don Burleson receives sightings reports and photos every day. But his ongoing interest rests in the classic UFO cases. Without batting an eye, Burleson jumps between talking about the Lubbock Lights of 1951, the Tremonton, Utah film taken by Delbert Newhouse on July 2, 1952, and the Great Falls, Montana UFO film captured by Nick Mariana on August 15, 1950.
.I.m finding that the old, vintage UFO photos are really the best stuff,. says Burleson. .They.re really some of the best sources that we have..
Since Burleson also directs Eastern New Mexico University.s computer lab, he devotes a lot of his research to analyzing vintage film footage of classic UFO encounters, using computer image-enhancing software. He scans photos, enlarges them, and studies them for patterns . details that may relate to other UFO photos.
The Great Falls film is one of his favorites. Nick Mariana saw two rapidly moving bright lights, which shone like two new dimes in the sky, some 10,000 feet above ground. The Montanan grabbed his 16-mm camera from his car and started filming.
Burleson has a blown-up image of the disc-shaped craft; .image drag. indicates that it was spinning. As the story goes, the government tried to pass the sighting off as a couple of F-94 planes. The military borrowed the film, but eventually returned it to Mariana with the first 30 frames completely cut from the film . the stuff with the most convincing footage is lost presumably forever.
Burleson.s background in cryptanalysis, or code deciphering, adds another dimension to his research. The photo of the so-called Ramey Letter . which General Roger Ramey held in his hand during the Fort Worth press conference that announced a weather balloon had been recovered . is another of Burleson.s primary subjects. Because the print is microscopic, enlarging the photo alone doesn.t reveal the letter.s contents, the researcher contends; a computer is needed.
While the U.S. government.s Weaver Report, of 1994, reported that the letter revealed nothing, Burleson says he can identify nine lines of type, and read 80 percent of the letter. Visitors to the UFO museum can inspect the letter for themselves. Ramey is pictured crouching, holding a piece of paper . what.s essentially a military communiqué . that, in Burleson.s view, talks about crash victims being transported somewhere for a team to review, the recovery of a disc, something being urgent, and a weather balloon.
.General Ramey was telling the press, at the time the photo was taken, that nothing happened in Roswell,. says Burleson, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature and recently penned A Roswell Christmas Carol. .But this is the smoking gun..
Driving back to Phoenix
On the way back to Phoenix, we took the southern route, through Alamogordo (where the International Space Hall of Fame is located) and the White Sands military base (where everything is fenced off). New Mexico is dope. When the sky is clear, you can see forever . mountains and sand.
Heading west, Zookeeper, Blobbert, and I could start talking all sorts of randomness. Like this little conversational snippet:
Wiggz: This could be a pretty cool concept. Training people how to make other people paranoid telepathically.
Zookeeper: I think we do a pretty good job of that already.
Blobbert: Are you guys talking about me?
Zookeeper: So do you want to go to the National Atomic Museum?
Wiggz: I wonder if they sell coloring books in the gift shop.
Zookeeper: Nuclear refrigerator magnets.
Blobbert: T-shirts that say, .Our nuclear bombs are better..
Wiggz:: What if they had a mushroom farm there?
Blobbert: I.d like to buy a mushroom cloud. You know, that city wouldn.t be here if it weren.t for that.
Wiggz: No, there was farming.
Blobbert: This bottled water has alien magic crispness.
Wiggz: Alien magic Christmas?
Blobbert: No, I said crispness. You understood it as Christmas?
Wiggz: I don.t care. I like it better the other way.
Driving through Alamogordo, we stopped for breakfast at Ramona.s (2913 N White Sands Blvd.; 505.437.7616), and savored the best dish of huevos rancheros we.ve ever had. This was an insanely delicious breakfast, served to us directly from a cart. Go there, and soak in the carpet.s brown-orange floral-paisley design, brown brick window arches, gnarly passive smoke, brown folk-colonial wall accent pieces, and burnt-orange walls. Everything is framed in brown. Even the rim of the coffee cup is brown. Maybe the people sitting next to you will wear brown. Or maybe all of the cars in the parking lot will be brown. After all, Ramona.s has four of the same letters as .moreno,. which is Spanish for .brown.: the letter .e. is the only thing that.s missing, and the letter .a.. There.s something there, I tell you.
While in Alamogordo, we sauntered through the International Space Hall of Fame, which gives you a wicked view of White Sands from miles away. In front, in the John P. Stapp Air and Space park, you see the rocket sled that in 1954 Stapp drove at a speed of 632 miles per hour (1000 kph), in his effort to measure the human response to deceleration . 43Gs, the same as that which an airplane pilot would feel ejecting from a plane traveling 1,000 mph at 35,000 feet. Nearby, you can stick your head into an F-1 rocket engine, which, combined with four other F-1s, powered the Saturn 5 rocket that carried men to the Moon.
Inside the museum, Blobbert and I danced around in the Mars simulation room (just a room with Mars wallpaper and a red light). And Zookeeper did a really good job with the flight simulator game; impetuously refusing to sit to hear the instructions, I crashed twice. But I did get to hang out with the Skylab mannequin, and check out the aerosol can of Pepsi that cosmonauts drank . warm, no less . in some 1980-something mission. And I read about how Mercury astronauts consumed pureed meats and vegetables in squeeze tubes, bite-sized food cubes, and tables. You get the idea.
I should also mention that we stopped and saw The Thing . a strange little museum displaying random trinkets, located somewhere due west of the Arizona-New Mexico border. It.s hard to describe what.s inside. But it costs a buck to see. Says Blobbert, .It was looking right at me. There were these walls made of driftwood there were carved and had faces on the ends. Those were creepy. The very cool thing about The Thing is that after you get to see The Thing, you get to see the gift shop about The Thing.. You have to see The Thing for yourself. This is what America really means.
Alas, all good parties . even the best ones . come to an end. It.s a sad fact of the human condition. AlienZoo spent three days in Roswell and had an absolute blast. We.d do it again in a heartbeat. Just wait .til we hit Laughlin next week.