From: Doug Roberts (doug@nolimits.demon.co.uk)

From The Guardian 25/07/95


Almost 50 years ago something crashed at the Roswell air force base in New Mexico. What was it? UFO buffs always said it was a flying saucer. Now they have evidence. Martin Walker reports

BYLINE: Martin Walker

IMAGINE a pubescent but pregnant girl, humanoid but distinctly alien, with a bald and giant head and lizard eyes. She could come from the garish cover of any science fiction magazine.

Under the scalpel, her flesh gives and bleeds. The joints flex and the limbs bend, and the great wound on the thigh suggests muscle and ligament. The scalpel cuts the flesh away, to reveal a vast skull of unusually thick bone. The surgeon wielding the saw pauses to rest in his work. When the contents of the skull are removed, they are flesh-like, but most unlike a human brain with its grooves and folds.

If brain this is, it looks like a chunk of liver on this grainy, soundless black and white film that claims to have been shot in 1947.

If these large, elliptical lizard slits are eyes, they are covered with a black film, which is then carefully removed by the surgeons, revealing white orbs. The scalpel goes down the trunk, to the swollen belly which suggests that this small being might have been pregnant. There are female genitalia, but no navel, and no hair. Once the body cavity is exposed, there are no familiar coils of intestine. The body organs are again flesh-like, soft and yet distinctly odd. There are six digits at the end of each long, slim arm, six toes on each foot.

This is eerily familiar, from the visions of sci-fi illustrators, and also from the medical books of anatomy, as if this being under the surgeon's knife were a composite of four or five different human pathologies.

There are no prosthetics. This does not look like some creation of the Hollywood special effects labs. This seems convincingly to be the autopsy of some kind of being.

There are two films. The first lasts about 18 minutes, and takes place in some kind of operating theatre, with surgeons in masks and gowns.

The second film is shot from inside a tent, in the half-light of emergency lanterns. The being is largely covered by a sheet. A male and female medical attendant flex the limbs and conduct what seems to be a preliminary examination. A man in civilian clothes is present, and seems to be in charge. This film lasts about three minutes, and there is no sound on either film clip.

"If that is a hoax, it is a most elaborate and convincing and believable one," said Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico, as he sat and watched the films last month in his Washington office, with his staff and other government officials around him.

We were shown the clips, and sworn to secrecy (until now), by the British documentary film-maker John Purdie of Union Pictures. On August 28, these two brief clips of film, which purport to record the US Air Force autopsies of two crashed alien beings, will be screened simultaneously as part of Purdie's Roswell documentary, on Channel 4 in Britain, on Fox-TV in the US, in Japan and in Europe.

This film is the first hard evidence to emerge from the most celebrated and best-documented UFO event of all, the mysterious crash of a strange aerial craft near the Roswell Air Force base in New Mexico at 11.30pm on July 4, 1947.

Forget about Whitewater and Watergate and even the unsettled issues of who shot President Kennedy. The biggest conspiracy of all, that earth has been visited by aliens and their bodies autopsied on film, is clambering out of the bizarre underworld of the cults and into the realm of the rational and verifiable world.

Prodded by his New Mexico constituents and his own curiosity, Congressman Schiff began his own probing of the Roswell mystery three years ago. His first success was to force the US Air Force to drop the cover story it had maintained on Roswell since 1947 - that the crash was of an experimental high-altitude weather balloon, and the strange metal was ordinary tinfoil.

Last year, the US Air Force changed its story, telling Congressman Schiff in an official report that this had been a cover story for an important secret. The crash had been of a balloon, but not concerned with weather. It was "Operation Mogul", an experimental high-altitude balloon designed to detect radiation and monitor an eventual first test of a Soviet atom bomb.

Unsatisfied with what he calls "the most unaccountable stonewalling I have ever encountered", Congressman Schiff and other legislators have succeeded in ordering the Government Accounting Office, the watchdog of the federal government, to mount its own new inquiry, to track down all documents relating to Roswell held by any US government agency.

That report will be delivered to Congressman Schiff on Friday, and will be publicly released next week. The GAO report finds no smoking gun or smoking UFO, but does record a large number of documents destroyed, stressing that this is not necessarily unusual given an event that took place nearly 50 years ago. Conspiracy theorists will seize on what has been destroyed. Less prejudiced historians will question whether an event of this importance could possibly have had all the paper trails erased.

There is no doubt that something odd happened at Roswell. The first people to arrive on the Roswell site on July 5, 1947, was a team of archaeologists, led by Dr W Curry Holden of Texas Tech university. They reported to the local sheriff that they had seen "a crashed airplane without wings, and with a fat fuselage". They reported also seeing three bodies, two outside the craft, and one still inside, visible through a gash in the fuselage.

Then came two campers, James Ragsdale and Trudie Truelove, who reported that the bodies were "four or five foot long at the most". Ragsdale was more interested in the unusual metal at the crash site. It looked like tinfoil, but much stronger. "You could take that stuff and wad it up and it would straighten itself out".

Within minutes, the sounds of a siren signalled the arrival of Military Police jeeps from the Roswell Army-Air Force base, 35 miles away. Roswell was the home of the 509th Bomb Group, then the world's only atomic strike force, whose newsletter was called "The Atomic Blast".

The site was sealed, the civilians were cleared off, and high-ranking civilian and military officials began to fly in to the site. And three days later, the press began to gather, alerted by a press release issued by Lieutenant Walter Haut, public information officer of the 509th, who told the local press of the crash and recovery of "a flying disc".

Haut is today the president of the International UFO Museum and research centre at 400, North Main Street, Roswell. A modest store-front building which has become the main tourist asset of the tiny New Mexico town, Haut's Musuem has helped keep the controversy alive.

There are further intriguing snippets of evidence, which have kept the Roswell UFO story running as a local issue, fuelling the official interest of the local Republican Congressman Steven Schiff.

First, there is the local undertaker, Glenn Dennis, who was asked by the base if he could provide child-sized coffins. Then there was the local fireman Dan Dwyer, whose crew was called out to the crash site, collected some of the mysterious metal debris, and told his family of seeing two body bags and one still-alive being "about the size of a 10-year-old child".

There is the local sheriff, George Wilcox, who told his family he and they had been threatened with death if they ever talked about the Roswell crash. There was Major Jesse Marcel, intelligence officer of the 509th bomb group, who took some of the strange metal home to show his children, and they could not decipher the strange hieroglyphic and geometrical shapes that seemed to be markings.

The testimony of those local witnesses, and a handful of former military personnel, has been for two decades the tantalising sum of the flimsy array of hearsay evidence and vague memories that has made up the Roswell case.

The film was obtained by another British film-maker, Ray Santilli of Merlin Productions, who was originally looking for 1950s documentary footage of rock stars. He found a retired US cameraman with a large collection, who decided finally to make public the films he had taken as a USAF film technician at Roswell, and at the autopsy centre of Fort Worth.

"We know the man who took the film, and even though he complains his life will be made a misery once he comes forward, we are hoping to persuade him to explain what happened on camera", John Purdie told The Guardian yesterday. "We are taking an objectively agnostic line."

From on-film coding, Kodak confirms that this is film stock from either 1947, or from 1967 - a time when the Roswell UFO story was dead. Congressman Schiff is arranging for US government labs to study the film further, but so far its authenticity has not been questioned.

British and US pathologists who have seen the the film say it appears to be a real autopsy, probably performed by surgeons rather than expert pathologists, and using the medical technology of the late 1940s.

"If it happened, if there is even one credible piece of evidence that earth has been visited by aliens, it changes everything," commemnted Richard DeMotto, national security aide to Senator Robert Byrd. "It only had to happen once."