Glenn Dennis was a mortician in Roswell in 1947. His employer provided mortuary services for Roswell Army Air Field. Dennis claimed that in early July he received several phone calls from the Roswell AAF mortuary officer, who was more of an administrator than a mortuary technician. The officer wanted to know about chemical solutions and hermetically sealed caskets, including how small they came. That evening, Dennis took a GI accident victim to the base infirmary. He walked the injured GI inside, then drove around to the back to see a nurse he had recently gotten to know. According to Dennis, the nurse warned him that he should not be there, that he was going to get himself killed. Almost immediately, a “big, red-headed colonel” said “what’s that son of a bitch doing here?”
Dennis was quickly escorted off the base and told, “you open your mouth and you’ll be so far back in the jug they’ll have to shoot pinto beans [into you] with a bean shooter.” Dennis also told Stanton Friedman that he spoke with the nurse again the following day, who told him there had been three little bodies—two were badly mangled, one was in fairly good condition. The nurse swore him to secrecy and was soon transferred to England. Later, Dennis said, he heard that the nurse had been killed in a plane crash. The identity of the nurse has never been established.23
Barbara Dugger was the granddaughter of Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox. She claimed that her grandmother, Inez (the wife of George Wilcox), said that after the incident, military police told the Wilcox couple that the entire family would be killed if they ever talked about it. Inez said George Wilcox had gone out to the site, saw a big burned area, debris, and “four space beings” with large heads and suits “like silk.” One of the beings was alive. According to Dugger: “if she [Inez] said it happened, it happened.”24
Joyce worked at the Roswell radio station in 1947. He claimed that during the frenzy of activity in town, the station received a phone call from someone identifying himself as an officer at the Pentagon. According to Joyce:
... this man said some very bad things about what would happen to me. He was really pretty nasty. Finally, I got through to him. I said, “You’re talking about a release from the U.S. Army Air Corps.” Bang, the phone went dead, he was just gone.
That evening, Joyce received a call from Mac Brazel, who said the station had not gotten his story right. Joyce invited Brazel to the station. He now claimed that the debris was from a weather balloon. Joyce commented that this story differed quite a lot from Brazel’s earlier claim about the little green men, to which Brazel is supposed to have said, “No, they weren’t green.” Joyce had the feeling Brazel was “under tremendous pressure.”25
Loretta Proctor’s brother, Master Sgt. Robert Porter, was a B-29 flight engineer with the 830th Bomb Squadron. Porter claimed to have flown Roswell debris to Fort Worth and that one officer said they were parts of a flying saucer. On board were Lt. Col. Payne Jennings (deputy commander of Roswell) and Major Marcel.
First Lt. Robert Shirkey was assistant operations officer of the 509th Bomb Group. Shirkey said that he saw part of the loading process that transported the debris to Fort Worth, “carrying parts of the crashed flying saucer.”
Robert Slusher, a staff sergeant assigned to the 393rd Bomb Squadron, corroborated Shirkey’s account. Slusher said he was on board a B-29 that carried a single crate from Roswell to Fort Worth, which he described as twelve feet long, five feet wide, and four feet high. The contents of the crate seemed to be sensitive to air pressure, since the plane flew at the unusually low altitude of four to five thousand feet (rather than the standard twenty-five thousand for a B-29). Unlike the cabin, which could be pressurized, the bomb bay (where the crate was stowed) could not be pressurized. This suggests the crate was carrying something other than metal. Slusher also believed the flight to be unusual in that it was a hurried flight, ordered with little advanced notice; he also reported rumors that the crate had debris from the crash.
Another witness to the transport of debris was Robert Smith, a member of the First Air Transport Unit, which operated Douglas C-54 Skymaster fourengined cargo planes out of RAAF. Smith helped load crates of debris into the aircraft. He described seeing many armed guards, something unusual at Roswell, and “a lot of people in plainclothes all over the place.” There were quite a few crates to load, and the whole process took six to eight hours. He claimed to have seen a small piece of foil that would not crease.26
The foregoing account of witnesses is by no means exhaustive, but should give an indication that, by the 1990s, the air force was in danger of losing control of the Roswell story.
