On Friday, July 1st, at about 4:30 pm Joanne and I were in Roswell, NM in the North Library Room of the UFO Museum (IUFOMRC) located at 114 North Main Street. We had just finished a program we had rehearsed several times for this moment. We were among the 18 speakers working for the Museum as part of the 75th Anniversary of the Roswell UFO Crash of July 1947.
Both of us were nervous when we started at 3:00. We were trying out a new program with a different format called “The Psychic and the Detective.” We were presenting short interviews of 4 women who had keys roles in important UFO events. Joanne played the part of each of these women, and I was the investigator doing follow-up interviews. Here is the program description:
Women and UFOs: The Psychic and the Detective
Using interviewing techniques James, the career investigator and Joanne, the psychic medium, will re-enact the stories of 4 women whose life stories illustrate diverse aspects of the UFO encounter experience.
1. June Crain Kaba worked at Wright Paterson AFB from 1942-1952. In 1997, shortly before her death, she gave James the rights to her story which included evidence of UFO craft retrievals.
2. Estella Krussel was a key witness to the Westport crash of 1979. She had the best view and deepest connection to whatever went down in the wooded hillsides over this little seaside town.
3. Ms. Dale Spaur was the wife of Deputy Dale Spaur who chased a UFO across miles of Ohio countryside in April of 1966. Officer Spaur’s refusal to change his story about what happened destroyed their marriage and changed her life forever.
4. Frankie Rowe was a child at the time of the Roswell UFO crash of 1947. Shortly before her death in 2017, she told the Clarksons how she held a piece of the UFO metal and then was terrorized by the military.
A woman had entered the hall partway into our presentation. She approached afterwards and showed her press credentials introducing herself as Emma Parry, a reporter for The Sun UK a well-known British publication. She asked about the program we had just completed, and she wanted to know what we knew about the Roswell story. I explained that I had been to Roswell many times since 2000 and on our second trip I brought a copy of my main interview transcript with June Crain, an indirect Roswell witness who worked at Wright Patterson AFB in 1947. I was donating a special printing of the interview to the UFO Museum Research Library.
What was unexpected and amazing in 2000 was meeting Glenn Dennis, a famous Roswell witness. I met him and Walter Haut, another famous Roswell witness, the former Base Public Relations Officer who issued the famous press release on orders from the commander.
Afterwards I sat with Glenn Dennis in private having coffee, and he related the story of what happened in July of 1947 when he was a young man working for the Ballard Funeral Home. His involvement began when he answered a phone call from the Roswell Army Air Force at Walker Field. The caller asked the fateful question, “How many child-sized coffins do you have in stock?” (The rest of his story is included in the linked article below.)
Glenn Dennis later become one of the founding Board members of the International UFO Museum and Research Center. He also became the focus of controversy because he refused to break a promise to his friend, the mysterious nurse who went to work that day and participated in a real alien autopsy. She was so badly shaken by the experience that she resigned her commission and left the military to a nunnery.
In the Eighties he was relentlessly pursued by UFO investigators, not just for his Roswell story, but they hoped he would identify the nurse as an eyewitness to the military examining the body of a real ET. Glenn got so exasperated that he decided to invent a name for the nurse so the investigators would leave him alone. He told me that was one of the worst mistakes of his life, something he genuinely regretted.
Glenn Dennis passed away on April 28, 2015, but whenever Roswell is mentioned, he will be remembered, and I remain honored that I had an opportunity to hear his story directly.
Back in 2022, my interview with The Sun Reporter Emma Parry continued until her photographer arrived. He took pictures at various locations in the room until he posed me in front of two shiny black alien statues at the back of the lecture hall. I thought at the time that this was either a promising idea or I would end up a laughingstock.
In the end it was better than I expected. She quoted me accurately and represented me well. Other than my friend June Crain, there is no one I would rather be directly associated with than Glenn Dennis. Here is the link to the story in The SUN UK:
https://www.the-sun.com/news/5690099/military-ufo-coffins-roswell-crash/
The news media keeps going over the stories of Congressional interest in the Hearings on UFOs/UAPs and their significance as possible national security threats.
Officialdom refuses to accept any high strangeness UFO reports that happened before 2004, and you won’t find any mention of Roswell in the official UFO investigations – Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, etc. even though the world was electrified when the Roswell Airfield Base Commander, Colonel William Blanchard made the announcement that they had captured a “Flying Saucer” on July 8, 1947. You would think that an announcement of that magnitude would have hurt Blanchard’s career if it were a mistake, or an elaborate joke. But Blanchard went on to become a 4-star general before he died of a heart attack at the Pentagon in 1966.
The Air Force pretends that Roswell never happened. It was the result of an inept Base Intelligence Officer from an elite unit, the world’s first nuclear bomber squadron, who did not know what a weather balloon looked like.
We associate Roswell with the first known official Contact with Extraterrestrials and their technology. We also associate the event with the beginning of the Big Denial – nothing significant happened at Roswell, or anywhere else thereafter. It’s always weather balloons and swamp gas. Nothing to see here, folks, so move along.
We know better. It always comes back to Roswell. I hope that the 11,981 visitors to the UFO Museum for the 75th Anniversary Event know better now also. What was old becomes new again.
James Clarkson
UFO Detective
Port Townsend, WA USA
2 replies on “Roswell Witness Remembered”
Well done Sir, well done!!
I can only say “wow!”