The One that Got Away, Part 2
Mike Smith
in Roswell Edition Column
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In any controversial historical event, be it something as well known as the Kennedy Assassination or even something as obscure as the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1800s Utah, there will oftentimes be many different remembrances of just what exactly happened.
And so it is with the Roswell Incident, with different witnesses giving their varying, and sometimes contradictory, testimonies. Nowhere is there more of a grey area when dealing with the incident than with witness testimonies of what may or may not have happened to the alien survivor (or survivors) of the crash. It is there that there is the widest amount of variation of witness descriptions of just how many alien bodies there were, how many of those aliens may have survived, what condition the survivors were in, and what exactly happened to them after the crash.
In last week’s column we explored one of the most interesting, but rarely discussed, possibilities of what may have happened to one of the crashed saucer’s intergalactic passengers. According to this story, related by author John Tilley in Expose’: Roswell UFO Incident (Corona Crash ), one of the aliens from the crash survived, was taken to the base hospital and then managed to somehow escape custody, wander amongst a small group of houses, and then get shot by startled guards.
Ironically in Roswell the biggest stumbling block in a story like this isn’t the fact that there may have been aliens from outer space, but instead how did one of them get away from the military? John Tilley has always wondered this as well. “I have no idea how that thing would have gotten away from ‘em,” Tilley says. “The room had to have been guarded or should have had MPs all around that place but it got away from them according to the story [and] made its way off base.”
One would certainly think this surviving alien would have been more highly guarded, but on the other hand things were incredibly hectic on the base those first couple of nights, such as the one Glenn Dennis arrived on. Because a live alien being would no doubt be under constant supervision, perhaps the one to escape was thought dead, and in fact was only unconscious or even in some form of brief suspended animation, and placed with the other dead bodies. When it awoke, possibly unguarded amongst the confusion the base was in on the first nights of the Incident, it got up and walked out and managed to slip away. Of course, this is only speculation on my part.
There have been many other accounts detailing what may have happened to the surviving alien, with some sources claiming it was taken to Wright-Patterson airfield in Ohio, some saying it was experimented on by the military, and others claiming it died from injuries sustained in the crash. Particularly helpful in tracking down accounts of alien crash survivors was Don R. Schmitt’s and Thomas J. Carey’s brand new book Witness to Roswell. The book is chock full of cool stories and interviews with many folks who saw both the wreckage from the crash and the alien bodies. The Ohio story mentioned above is backed in the book by Mac Magruder, who said he saw the surviving alien at Wright Field in Ohio two weeks after the Roswell Incident. Later, his children say, he learned the military had been experimenting on it and it died.
Of course, this account differs greatly from the alien dying at the RAAF via gunshot wounds by frightened guards at the front gate, but there could be another scenario. Maybe there was more than one survivor of the crash.
Although most reports of the crash have descriptions of four bodies, some reports, notably those among the original 1980 book by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Roswell Incident , have witnesses describing six bodies, in another version nine bodies (some of which were still inside the craft), and even more implausibly one man reported nearly thirty bodies were being kept at Wright-Patterson Airfield in Ohio by the 1950s. Conflicting reports of witnesses would also seem to suggest the two-survivor theory with some saying they saw an alien walk onto the base under its own power while other accounts describe the survivor as barely alive, much less able to walk.
The alien that was said to have walked onto the base under heavy guard is possibly backed by a photograph (see the one accompanying this article), which due to its too-good-to-be true nature, must undoubtedly be a hoax. The photo, appearing in the book The Roswell Incident , appears to be a copy of a copy of a copy of a…well, you get the picture. The photo was turned over in 1950 to the FBI Field Office in New Orleans from an unnamed informant who claimed to have purchased the photograph in Germany from a US soldier stationed there. The man felt it his duty to turn the photograph over to the government for the sake of National Security. Could this photo, if authentic, picture the very alien that escaped?
Again, though, some witnesses claim the surviving alien as being in such bad condition that it could not possibly walk under its own power, which again points to the theory that there may have been two surviving aliens, one in good enough shape to walk under its own power, and the other in a worse condition. Amongst all the hubbub at the base it would’ve been tough for witnesses to know for sure.
The two-alien-survivor theory is further supported in The Roswell Incident via an old interview with Mac Brazel’s son, Bill Brazel, although not in the way you would think. Strangely, Mac never shared details of alien bodies with his son, but Bill heard a story about the bodies years later while on a job in Alaska. While Bill was talking to a fellow worker about the Roswell Incident and his father’s involvement in it one night, the other fellow did him one better and claimed to have known two of the men on the recovery crew. According to the man, who Brazel called Lamme, two surviving aliens were found inside of the craft. Also according to Lamme, the beings’ throats were damaged because of inhaling burning gasses and fumes in the crash, and were therefore rendered mute and required respirators to be kept alive. This interestingly coincides with the photograph of the walking alien at the base, who appears to be on some form of respirator or breathing device. Lamme’s story does not match with Mac Magruder’s however, as Lamme claims the aliens were taken to California, not Ohio. Among the mismatch of facts its hard to discern anything for certain.
There is also another account of what happened to a surviving alien which has vague similarities to both the Lamme account above and the one appearing in Tilley’s book. Philip Corso, in his book The Day After Roswell, relates how two aliens were found alive at the crash site and were having great difficulty breathing our atmosphere. One of the surviving aliens was then said to have tried to run away from the crash sight and was shot by a guard.
Regardless of what happened to the survivor, there is one strong consistency in the reports of the witnesses, that of being terrified of the little beings dead or alive. Witness to Roswell even has an account of a military officer losing it merely at the sight of the dead bodies. A nurse, Miriam Bush, who saw one of them move on a gurney was never the same after the incident. Future Senator Joe Montoya reportedly had to have several drinks in order to calm himself down after seeing the bodies.
If what Tilley reports in his book, Expose’: Roswell UFO Incident (Corona Crash) about one of the aliens escaping is true, then one can only imagine the otherworldly terror felt by people being interrupted by an alien peeking into their windows at night. As if peeping toms from this world weren’t bad enough, one with giant black slanted eyes was surely enough to make most people more than a little hysterical.
Tilley takes a more sympathetic look at the alien however. “I would imagine that was probably the most terrified little alien that you could ever conjure up in your mind," he says. "Scared to death in another world…another planet. If I were going to write a story about that I think I’d do it from the alien’s side.”
Sixty years later, more than the strange debris from the saucer, it seems to be the otherworldly occupants that truly haunt the witnesses. When one Maj. Edwin Easley, who was at RAAF in 1947, lay on his death bed his granddaughter brought him a book about the Roswell Incident. When holding the book in front of him where he could see the cover illustration he moaned these words: “Ohh, the creatures!”
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