Dennis

Dennis was not the first nor last Roswell witness talking about alien bodies, but he was for a long time the best-known one (perhaps superseded recently by base public information officer Walter Haut).

The nurse, he said, vanished immediately afterwards. He said he was told she had been transferred overseas to England, then that she had been killed there in a plane crash. said he didn't know if the nurse really had died and had promised the nurse never to reveal her name while he was alive. However, when pressured by some researchers to provide a name so they could corroborate that she existed, Dennis seemingly relented and provided the name "Naomi Marie Selff". After all efforts failed to verify that any such person ever existed, Dennis admitted that the name was false.

As a result, Dennis' credibility has come under heavy attack and thus his entire story has often been treated as dubious if not thoroughly fraudulent. However, Dennis told me, as he has others, that he was merely keeping his promise to the nurse to not reveal her true identity. In 2009, a new candidate for Nurse X publicly emerged, which may further explain why Dennis has been coy about her name. (See Mary Lowe story below, a Roswell nurse who was still alive and living in Roswell, well known to Dennis.) Further, there is in fact extensive witness corroboration for other parts of his story. This includes many new witnesses, both first and second hand, to alien bodies, giving very similar descriptions and accounts.

Witness corroboration for child casket story

Perhaps the earliest corroborative witness to Dennis' child-casket story was former Roswell police chief L.M. Hall (1993 affidavit), who remembered Dennis telling him only a few days after the newspaper stories of the crashed flying saucer, about strange calls from the base for child-size caskets "to ship or bury those aliens." Hall at the time thought he was joking.

(New! July 2009) Tom Carey and Don Schmitt unveiled many more recent corroborative witnesses to the casket story in their 2009 expanded edition of "Witness to Roswell." Adam Dutchover, then a young boy living in nearby Hagerman (about 25 miles south of Roswell), said he used to help out at the local small grocery store serving coffee to patrons. He recalled the talk of the flying saucer crash and the "little bodies." Regular customers were members of the Roswell Police Department and one or two employees of Ballard Funeral Home, where Dennis worked. Though he couldn't recall most of the names, he did remember the Ballard people talking about the need for ordering "small caskets" for the Air Force. (pp. 146-147)

More convincingly, three adult friends of Dennis, Rex Alcorn, Clifford Butts, and William Burkstaller recalled Dennis telling the story "back when it happened." Alcorn remembered Dennis "telling me at the time of the incident about receiving calls from the base inquiring about 'child-size caskets.'" (p. 147)

Roswell attorney Richard L. Bean said he heard about the crashed saucer "within days of the crash," but it was another year or two before he heard Dennis talking about receiving calls for children's caskets from the base. (p. 147)

(Added 2024) Very recently, Barbara Beck, current publisher of the Roswell Daily Record, stated that her father, Robert Beck, the publisher since 1955 (but who began with the RDR in Dec. 1947 after marrying the daughter of the previous publisher), told her he knew the Ballard family, who owned Ballard Funeral Home. At some point, Ballard related to him that they received a call from the base at night for four small, child-sized caskets. They were to leave them at the base, but not go inside. Beck's father told her he found the base request really odd, but no explanation was given and he didn't ask questions. She described her father as having served in the military and a no-nonsense businessman. (Related on the CW Network, 2020, "Mysteries Decoded: Roswell Revisited" S1E9, 5:00' in)

Further backing this story, Garner Mason, whose father, grandfather, and uncles ran the family mortuary business in Hagerman at the time [Hagerman is about 30 miles south of Roswell], said it was their mortuary that actually made the delivery of child caskets to the Roswell base hospital. "We received the call from Ballard's, because they didn't have enough of them to fill the order. So we made the delivery to the base. They were actually made out of cardboard." (Carey & Schmitt, p. 147)

Another recent witness, Beverly Otto, said she worked at the National Institute of Health in Washington soon after the "Roswell business". She briefly met an Army nurse during a dinner with women friends. The nurse was recently assigned to Walter Reed hospital in Washington and said she was previously stationed at the base near Roswell. When jokingly asked about the "little people" at Roswell, she responded, "I was the nurse who ordered the children's coffins, because they were just big enough for the little guys who were in the spaceship." (p. 148)

Another witness that recently came forth to corroborate parts of Dennis' story was S/Sgt. Milton Sprouse, then a B-29 crew chief with the 830th Bomb Squadron. Sprouse said he spoke to Dennis several years later while Dennis handled a funeral for a friend. Dennis told him he had received a call from the base for five children's caskets for a crash that had happened 2 or 3 days before.

With all this corroborative testimony, it seems that Dennis' story of the child casket call is not of recent origin but dates back to the original event itself. Dennis did not make it up as the Roswell incident became widely known in the 1980s, contrary to the claims of a number of debunkers.

Corroborative testimony to autopsies at hospital and disappearing medical personnel

Sprouse also said the bodies were taken to a hangar heavily guarded by MPs with machine guns. In addition, he knew something about the autopsy initially described by Dennis. A fellow staff sergeant in his barracks, who worked as an emergency room medic at the base hospital, was called out there. When he came back he related that an autopsy on one or two of the "humanoid bodies" had been carried out by two doctors and two nurses. His friend said he had seen the bodies. Similar to Dennis' nurse, the sergeant was transferred the following day and nobody ever found out what became of him. Sprouse also heard that the doctors and nurses involved with the autopsy were also transferred and nobody found out what became of them either. Five members of his ground crew were also sent to the ranch to help clean up the debris field. They told him the material was "out of this world," including foil that when crumpled returned to its original shape. (San Diego Union-Tribune & North County Times story, San Diego/Riverside, CA, 9/30/2007 & 10/26/2007)

Another story about the alien bodies and a vanishing nurse came from Pete and Ruben Anaya, who said they picked up N.M. Lt. Governor Joseph Montoya outside the large base hangar (see more details below). Besides the hangar being heavily guarded by MPs, they said there was a base nurse (or maybe two different nurses) who came outside the hangar and spoke briefly with them. Ruben said she told him that the bodies were "not from this world" and then noticed one of them moving. Ruben said he then went to take a look and also glimpsed two small bodies from a distance under sheets inside the hangar and one of them moving. He described the nurse he spoke to as blondish and heavyset. [Note: Of the five nurses that are pictured in the base yearbook from around June/July 1947, none of them appear blondish or heavyset, though other nurses worked at the base not pictured in the yearbook.]

AFFIDAVIT OF GLENN DENNIS

(1) My name is Glenn Dennis

(2) My address is: XXXXXXXXXX

(3) I am ( ) employed as: __________________________________ ( ) retired,

(4) In July 1947, I was a mortician, working for the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell, which had a contract to provide mortuary services for the Roswell Army Air Field. One afternoon, around 1:15 or 1:30, I received a call from the base mortuary officer who asked what was the smallest size hermetically sealed casket that we had in stock. He said, "We need to know this in case something comes up in the future." He asked how long it would take to get one, and I assured him I could get one for him the following day. He said he would call back if they needed one.

(5) About 45 minutes to an hour later, he called back and asked me to describe the preparation for bodies that had been lying out on the desert for a period of time. Before I could answer, he said he specifically wanted to know what effect the preparation procedures would have on the body's chemical compounds, blood and tissues. I explained that our chemicals were mainly strong solutions of formaldehyde and water, and that the procedure would probably alter the body's chemical composition. I offered to come out to the base to assist with any problem he might have, but he reiterated that the information was for future use. I suggested that if he had such a situation that I would try to freeze the body in dry ice for storage and transportation.

(6) Approximately a hour or an hour and 15 minutes later, I got a call to transport a serviceman who had a laceration on his head and perhaps a fractured nose. I gave him first aid and drove him out to the base. I got there around 5:00 PM.

(7) Although I was a civilian, I usually had free access on the base because they knew me. I drove the ambulance around to the back of the base infirmary and parked it next to another ambulance. The door was open and inside I saw some wreckage. There were several pieces which looked like the bottom of a canoe, about three feet in length. It resembled stainless steel with a purple hue, as if it had been exposed to high temperature. There was some strange-looking writing on the material resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics. Also there were two MPs present.

(8) I checked the airman in and went to the staff lounge to have a Coke. I intended to look for a nurse, a 2nd Lieutenant, who had been commissioned about three months earlier right out of college. She was 23 years of age at the time (I was 22). I saw her coming out of one of the examining rooms with a cloth over her mouth. She said, "My gosh, get out of here or you're going to be in a lot of trouble." She went into another door where a Captain stood. He asked me who I was and what I was doing here. I told him, and he instructed me to stay there. I said, "It looks like you've got a crash; would you like me to get ready?" He told me to stay right there. Then two MPs came up and began to escort me out of the infirmary. They said they had orders to follow me out to the funeral home.

(9) We got about 10 or 15 feet when I heard a voice say, "We're not through with that SOB. Bring him back." There was another Captain, a redhead with the meanest-looking eyes I had ever seen, who said, "You did not see anything, there was no crash here, and if you say anything you could get into a lot of trouble." I said, "Hey look mister, I'm a civilian and you can't do a damn thing to me." He said, "Yes we can; somebody will be picking your bones out of the sand." There was a black Sergeant with a pad in his hand who said, "He would make good dog food for our dogs." The Captain said, "Get the SOB out." The MPs followed me back to the funeral home.

(10) The next day, I tried to call the nurse to see what was going on. About 11:00 AM, she called the funeral home and said, "I need to talk to you." We agreed to meet at the officers club. She was very upset. She said, "Before I talk to you, you have to give me a sacred oath that you will never mention my name, because I could get into a lot of trouble." I agreed.

(11) She said she had gone to get supplies in a room where two doctors were performing a preliminary autopsy. The doctors said they needed her to take notes during the procedure. She said she had never smelled anything so horrible in her life, and the sight was the most gruesome she had ever seen. She said, "This was something no one has ever seen." As she spoke, I was concerned that she might go into shock.

(12) She drew me a diagram of the bodies, including an arm with a hand that had only four fingers; the doctors noted that on the end of the fingers were little pads resembling suction cups. She said the head was disproportionately large for the body; the eyes were deeply set; the skulls were flexible; the nose was concave with only two orifices; the mouth was a fine slit, and the doctors said there was heavy cartilage instead of teeth. The ears were only small orifices with flaps. They had no hair, and the skin was black--perhaps due to exposure in the sun. She gave me the drawings.

(13) There were three bodies; two were very mangled and dismembered, as if destroyed by predators; one was fairly intact. They were three-and-a-half to four feet tall. She told me the doctors said: "This isn't anything we've ever see before; there's nothing in the medical textbooks like this." She said she and the doctors became ill. They had to turn off the air conditioning and were afraid the smell would go through the hospital. They had to move the operation to an airplane hangar.

(14) I drove her back to the officers' barracks. The next day I called the hospital to see how she was, and they said she wasn't available. I tried to get her for several days, and finally got one of the nurses who said the Lieutenant had been transferred out with some other personnel. About 10 days to two weeks later, I got a letter from her with an APO number. She indicated we could discuss the incident by letter in the future. I wrote back to her and about two weeks later the letter came back marked "Return to Sender--DECEASED." Later, one of the nurses at the base said the rumor was that she and five other nurses had been on a training mission and had been killed in a plane crash.

(15) Sheriff George Wilcox and my father were very close friends. The Sheriff went to my folks' house the morning after the events at the base and said to my father, "I don't know what kind of trouble Glenn's in, but you tell your son that he doesn't know anything and hasn't seen anything at the base." He added, "They want you and your wife's name, and they want your and your children's addresses." My father immediately drove to the funeral home and asked me what kind of trouble I was in. He related the conversation with Sheriff Wilcox, and so I told him about the events of the previous day. He is the only person to whom I have told this story until recently.

(16) I had filed away the sketches the nurse gave me that day. Recently, at the request of a researcher, I tried to locate my personal files at the funeral home, but they had all been destroyed.

(17) I have not been paid or given anything of value to make this statement, which is the truth to the best of my recollection.

Signed: Glenn Dennis

Date: 8-7-91

Signature witnessed by:

Walter G. Haut

[Sources: Karl Pflock, Roswell in Perspective, 1994

Karl Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, 2001

Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle, Beyond Roswell, 1999]

A corroborating witness to the crash site with a large burn area near Roswell was Cpt. Chester Barton, assigned to the 1395th MP unit, who was sent there later to check on the cleanup operation. He heard the bodies had been taken to the base hospital, though thought he was at the crash site of a B-29 and a nuclear accident had occurred (he was told the site was radioactive). The site was heavily guarded.

Frankie Rowe, daughter of Roswell fireman Dan Dwyer, said the fire department was called out to the site, thinking that a plane had crashed. Her father said he had seen two body bags and one non-human being, alive and walking around. It was the size of a ten-year-old child and had no hair. It had very small ears, large dark eyes, and was covered in a one-piece suit. The military threatened the whole family afterwards.

Very recently, the last surviving Roswell fireman (name given only as "Smith") was tracked down by researchers Tony Bragalia and Kevin Randle. He said the fire department was warned by an intimidating colonel from the base not to go out to the site, that "everything was being handled by the military." Instead, the base fire department was heavily involved, causing subsequent confusion. However several town firemen, including Dan Dwyer, decided to go out to the site on their own. The fireman added that the colonel told them that an "unknown object from someplace else" had crashed in the desert outside Roswell, that it was a craft not from Earth, the military didn't know where it was from and were greatly concerned. They were never to talk about it again. The sheriff's department and the city manager were also involved in covering it up.

A similar recent fireman story came from M/Sgt. John Tilley, who arrived at the base several months later, but heard stories from various people involved. A few years ago, a brother-in-law of his, Sgt. James W. Storm, told him he was involved in the transport of the wrecked UFO back to the base from its crash site. Storm was a member of the base fire department and said both base and town firemen, including the assistant fire chief, were at the site. They were ordered to accompany the tarped object carried on a flatbed truck back to the base. ("Witness", 2009, 107-108)

Sgt. Homer Rowlette was with the 603rd Air Engineering Squadron at Roswell. According to son Larry and daughter Carlene Green, he told them in the late 1980's near the end of his life and on his deathbed of being part of a cleanup detail sent to the impact site north of Roswell. Besides seeing the ship and handling strange debris, he had seen “three little people” with large heads, which he referred to as "the Greys." At least one was alive. (Carey & Schmitt, pp. 199-200, video testimony of Carlene Green)

According to four sons and a granddaughter of Lt. Col. Marion Magruder (detailed bio), a WWII and post-war Marine aviation commander, he told them on his deathbed (1997) of seeing the live alien at Wright Field after the crash during his attendance at the Air War College, sometime between July 1947 and July 1948. Mike Magruder said his father described the “creature” as under 5 feet tall, “human-like” but with longer arms, larger eyes, and an oversized, hairless head. It had a slit for a mouth and two holes but no appendages for a nose and ears. There was no question that it “came from another planet.” (Carey & Schmitt, 203-205)

Similar descriptions also appear in the affidavits of pilot Oliver "Pappy" Henderson's family. Henderson's wife Sappho Henderson recalled being told the beings were small with disproportionately large heads. She also recalled being told that the beings were packed in dry ice, a preservation technique Dennis said he recommended to prevent alteration of the chemical composition of the bodies. Dennis' Nurse X story also included the smell being overwhelming until the bodies were finally frozen. Henderson's daughter, Mary Groode, recalled being told that the aliens were "small and pale, with slanted eyes and large heads." Like Dennis, she remembered being told there were three bodies. Henderson's son and cousin also remember him telling the story.

Henderson's friend and business partner John Kromschroeder (affidavit) said Henderson first told him about the alien bodies in 1977. Kromschroeder described them only as "small", but claimed Henderson had also said he had actually flown the bodies to Wright Field along with wreckage. At a reunion of his old WWII flight crew in 1982, Henderson again repeated his story. Lt. Vere McCarthy remembered Henderson saying, "...something to the effect that they were badly deteriorated from exposure and gnawed at by predators." Again, this strikingly similar to Dennis' story of two of the three bodies being torn by predators.

Tony Bragalia also relates interviewing Rogene Cordes, a high school friend of Dennis', who also brought up the subject of dry ice. Cordes is the widow of an Air Force general and was also a neighbor of Sheriff Wilcox. She completely believes Dennis, knew Wilcox to be involved, and also knew she could not find any ice or dry ice anywhere during the July 4th weekend.

Another very similar story came independently from Beverly Bean, daughter of Sgt. Melvin Brown. Bean has stated that her father spoke of being one of the soldiers to stand guard out at the crash site and later outside a hangar where the bodies were stored awaiting shipment. Although Brown's official military occupation was a cook and baker, he was also a decorated WWII veteran, including a bronze star, his service papers further listing him as an expert marksman. Bev Bean in a letter to researcher Leonard Stringfield wrote:

..he stood guard once outside a hangar where a crashed saucer was stored. He couldn't see anything

as it was all packed up and ready to be flown out to Texas the next day. [see B-29 crate flight] We

disagree on the number of bodies he saw. I'm sure he said two, but one of my sisters said three...

All available men stood guard duty around the site where a crashed disc had come down and they

couldn't understand why they had to be kept cold, as there were trucks of ice... Although he and

others were told they would get into trouble if they saw too much, they did look under the cover and

saw two small dead bodies. He said they were like us, but not like us. They were smaller than a

normal man with large heads and slanted eyes. He also said they looked yellowish, a bit Asian...

I remember when I got older and asked for more information, he got angry and said, "that's all I

know and I shouldn't have told you that much." Whenever he talked about it, he always looked

worried... [Source: Stringfield, Status Report V, January 1989. Also Timothy Good, Alien Contact,

1991, which includes more of Bean's testimony and some of Brown's military records.]

In another statement, Bean said her father described the alien bodies this way:

He said they were smaller than a normal man--about four feet--and had much larger heads than us,

with slanted eyes, and that the bodies looked yellowish, a bit Asian-looking. [Friedman and

Berliner, Crash at Corona, 1992]

One of the crew members of a B29 flight the next day to Fort Worth carrying a heavily guarded mystery crate likewise said the crew knew of the rumors of a crashed disc with bodies found inside. (The crew suspected the crate contained the bodies.) Months later, he heard further body rumors from the wives gossiping about one of his neighbors who had participated in the clean-up:

Sometime afterwards, about three to six months later, the wives began talking among themselves

about the cleanup detail. This originated from the wives of men on that duty. One such was a

neighbor of ours in July 1947. They moved across town, but I would sometimes see him and I ask

him what he had seen out there. He was upset and told me, "You don't want to know." I think he

was a baker because he would leave for work in the early morning, like 0130 hours. A time or two

when I'd come in from a late flight he would be standing on the corner waiting for a ride. They did

not own a car. Based on the wives gossip we heard that he had seen a body.

Judging by this witness' description of the man as a "baker", he may have been referring to Sgt, Brown or one of his co-workers.

Finally, there is the Ramey teletype message to Gen. Vandenberg stating that "the victims of the wreck" were being "forwarded to" "Fort Worth, Tex." Computer OCR (optical character recognition) work that I am doing in 2014 (still unpublished) strongly suggest the next line reads (rated high probability letters and words by the computer) that "ca)davers in the 'disc'" were being "prep"ped by the "Army QMGR" (Quarter Master Grave Registration corp, the mortuary division of the Army) and this was being done "for A1" ("A1 here in this context would be a flight surgeon) presumably for autopsy at possibly an "ArmyAML" (AeroMedical Lab). On the next line the computer rates the following words and short sentence as high probability: "Bomber Wg affirm patient at Roswell." The "patient" here, in the context of the other previous "victims" and dead body mentions, would likely refer to the survivor of the crash, or the living alien mentioned in a number of witness accounts above. At the time of the Ramey memo, it was apparently still "at Roswell". Researcher Tom Carey has emailed me that he has some other military witness testimony that the being was kept at the base for several days before being moved elsewhere.

With all the other testimony and evidence that now exists concerning the recovery of bodies at Roswell, whether mortician Dennis' Nurse X existed or not has become almost irrelevant.

A new candidate for Nurse X--Mary Lowe

(New! July 2009) Yet another good candidate for Nurse X was Mary Crowley Lowe. In 1998, Tom Carey was tipped off to her existence by friends of hers, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Huttanus. In 1960, Mrs. Huttanus had been a civilian employee at the base (now named Walker Air Force Base), where Lowe was also employed. Mrs. Huttanus claimed, much to her shock, that Mary Lowe told her, "Back in 1947, I was a nurse and happened to be at the hospital when the aliens from the UFO crash were brought in." Huttanus said Lowe would say no more. The Hutanuses refused to identifiy the woman and added that she would deny the story even if she was located. However, they did inadvertantly leave a significant clue indicating she still lived in Roswell and that her husband was employed as a golf pro there at New Mexico Military Institute. With a little sleuthing, she was quickly identified as Mary Lowe.

Carey and Schmitt decided to have an associate, UFO historian Wendy Connors, approach Lowe in July 1999, believing a woman might have a better chance at gaining her trust. Connors was invited in for a two-hour chat, but Mary Lowe denied being at the base in 1947, saying she was an Army nurse stationed in Scotland at the time (similar to Dennis' story of her being sent to England immediately afterwards). However, her Army records indicated she was supposedly discharged in 1946 for marrying an enlisted man. (Military regulations then forbade officers and enlisted people marrying one another.) There was no explanation for the discrepancy.

When Connors asked Lowe if she had been at the base hospital in July 1947, Connors reported Lowe wanted to know if Glenn Dennis had been her informant. She was also very interested in Glenn Dennis' affidavit, which Connors read to her, while she remained silent, afterwards denying she was stationed there at the time.

Carey and Schmitt then approached Dennis the next day, to test his reaction to their new candidate for Nurse X. Providing only her first name of "Mary," Dennis quickly responded, "Oh, Mary Lowe. Yeah, she knows everything." Evidently, Lowe and Dennis knew each other very well.

The next day, Dennis retracted his statement. "About yesterday, forget what I said about Mary Lowe. I was mistaken. She doesn't know anything!" Carey and Schmitt suspect Mary Lowe erroneously blamed Dennis for outing her existence, called him on the phone soon after her interview with Wendy Connors, and told him to shut up, causing Dennis to retract his story. Since then, both Lowe and Dennis have refused to talk about it. Lowe is now believed to be dead, the reason Carey and Schmitt revealed her existence in their 2009 expanded edition of "Witness to Roswell" (pp. 149-151). Schmitt also confidentially told me the story of Lowe and Dennis several years ago, and I have only added it now that she has been made public.

Another indication that Mary Lowe may be Nurse X is a casual comment Dennis made to me in August 2001 when I was visiting the International UFO Museum in Roswell. I asked him about the nonexistent "Naomi Marie Selff", which he indicated was a made-up name, because he promised never to reveal her real name while he was alive. He then told me that one of her names was nearly correct , in retrospect presumably the "Marie" part. (Then again, "Miriam" Bush would also be close.)

The fact that Dennis was well aware that Mary Lowe was still alive and well and living in Roswell I suspect to be the reason he was less than honest about her name, and maybe altered some other details about her to further conceal her true identity (such as being told that she had died in a plane crash in England), perhaps making her a composite of several similar people at the base hospital, including Miriam Bush and Adeline Fanton.

Corroboration of unknown doctors at base hospital

Part of Dennis' story of his encounter with Nurse X at the hospital as she emerged gagging from an operating room (where on autopsy on what of the bodies was taking place), was that she was accompanied by two unknown doctors also overcome by the smell. The nurse revealed the next day when she spoke to Dennis about the autopsy that they were pathologists from Bethesda Hospital in Washington D.C.

A corroborating witness found by Carey and Schmitt to the Dennis and Bush accounts of unknown or outside medical personnel at the hospital came from Cpl.Arthur Fleury, hospital motor pool and ambulance driver. He told his wife that, "There were doctors, both military and civilian flying in from all over the world it seemed, at least from all over the country, whom I picked up and drove over to the base hospital. I never saw so many planes coming in and going out in such a short span of time. I didn't know what was going on, but I had heard the rumors. My job was simply to drive the ones coming in to the hospital and drive the ones going out to the airstrip." (Carey & Schmitt, p. 135)

Alien body eyewitness and secondary witnesses

An early eyewitness account of seeing the aliens came from Sgt. Frederick Benthal (testimony), who was an Army Air Force photographer flown in from Washington to photograph the bodies at the crash site north of Roswell. First interviewed in 1990, he remembered four small bodies. They were, "Dark complected. I remember they was thin, and it looked like they had too big of a head." There was a strange smell, like formaldehyde.

Another eyewitness account was from Roswell public information officer Lt. Walter Haut in a just-published affidavit, who revealed seeing the small bodies with big heads out at Hangar 84/P-3. They were about the size of 10 year old children, and base commander Col. William Blanchard indicated to him they were about 4 feet tall. In an interview from 2000, Haut described the body he saw as "a relatively small body, comparable to ah, oh maybe a ... ten or eleven-year-old child. It was pretty well beat up."

An eyewitness, recently found by Carey & Schmitt, to bodies and a live alien at the hospital was PFC "Elias Benjamin"--(real name Eleazar Benavides), an MP in the 390th Air Service Squadron. He was ordered out to Hangar 84/P-3 on the morning of July 8 (or perhaps the evening of July 7). There he was put in charge of a security detail to escort three or four bodies on gurneys from the hangar to the hospital. They were covered with sheets, but one of the sheets slipped during transfer, and that is when Benjamin saw the "grayish face and swollen, hairless head of a species that I realized was not human." He also noticed that one of the bodies seemed to be moving. At the base hospital, the sheets were removed, and doctors began working on one he thought was alive. He described it as "a very small person with an egg-shaped head that was oversized for its body... The only facial features that stick out in my mind now are that it had slanted eyes, two holes where its nose should have been, and a small slit where its mouth should have been." Also similar to Dennis' story of Nurse X, Benjamin added there was a very bad smell at the hospital. (Carey & Schmitt, pp. 136-140; video testimony of Benjamin from 2006 SyFy Investigates--Roswell program--1:15' into video)

Carey and Schmitt have proposed two body sites, one where the main craft came down north of Roswell, as described by Roswell PIO Walter Haut in his affidavit, and by various other witnesses. The other was near the Brazel debris field, about 70 miles to the northwest near Corona, N.M. At the north site, 30 or 40 miles from Roswell, the bodies were in fairly good condition, and this was also where the live alien was supposed to have come from. At the debris field site, the bodies were in much worse condition, severely decomposed, torn by predators and giving off a horrific stench.

Roswell radio news announcer Frank Joyce told Schmitt and Carey in 1998 (and myself in 2001) that rancher Mack Brazel told him about the small, foul-smelling, "not human" bodies when he first came to Roswell to report the crash. Also two days later after the military had him tell a balloon story to the press, Brazel came in to talk to Joyce. Joyce said he asked Brazel about his change of story and "What about the little green men?" Brazel replied tersely, "They weren't green," and left.

Brazel's closest neighbor Loretta Proctor reported that her young son Timothy "Dee" Proctor often hung around with Brazel and had been with him when he found the debris field. But he had also been with him when he had found something else at another location, which Loretta Proctor said had severely traumatized him for life. He would never say what it was, but finally took her out to the site in 1994 when he thought she might die. It was 2-1/2 miles east of the debris field. Dee Proctor would duck all attempts at interviews and died in 2006.

However, Schmitt and Carey found a possible eyewitness to the Brazel body site. From interviews with various rancher families, they claim the story of the Brazel debris field had already circulated widely in the Corona, N.M. area, many ranchers and rancher kids already knew about it before Brazel reported it to the military, and had gone out there for souvenirs of the strange debris. One of these rancher kids was Sydney “Jack” Wright. Wright told them in 1998 that he and two other rancher children had also gotten to "the other location," but seemingly would not tell them what he saw. However, through Hope Baldra, they found out that Wright had stated, “There were bodies, small bodies with big heads and eyes. And Mack was there too. We couldn’t get away from there fast enough." (pp. 46-47, 53)

Carey and Schmitt propose that the accounts of very foul smelling alien bodies probably indicate the Brazel/Corona site where the beings had been ejected from the craft and killed immediately, then lay decomposing in the desert sun for several days.

An interesting part of Glenn Dennis' story about the calls from the base for four small caskets also included the question, "How do you handle bodies that have been exposed out in the desert for four or five days?"

(On a possibly related note, one of the highly controversial "M-12 papers", supposedly a 1952 briefing document for newly elected President Eisenhower, also mentions a body site about 2 miles east of the debris field where four badly decomposed bodies were found, having ejected before the object exploded and having lain exposed to the elements for up to a week.)

This would suggest if Dennis' Nurse X was real, she was describing an attempted autopsy on one of these aliens, since the smell was so overwhelming, they had to move the operation out to the hangar.

As mentioned above, Eli Benjamin also mentioned a bad smell at the hospital. He didn't comment on the bodies smelling as they moved them from the hangar to the hospital, so possibly there was a lingering smell or other bodies already at the hospital or previously there in a more advanced stage of decomposition.

Another account of bad-smelling bodies came from the widow of Sgt. LeRoy Wallace, another MP. She said he was called away one evening to go to a crash site outside of Corona "to help load the bodies." When he returned home the next morning, he had a horrible stench on his clothes. She burned the clothes, but the horrible smell lingered on his body for another two weeks despite numerous baths. (Carey & Schmitt, 130)

In contrast, Pete Anaya said he knew the nurse he spoke to from the Officer's Club (his brother Ruben worked there as a cook), had danced with her once the previous Halloween at a party, said she resembled his wife Mary (photo right), and was a beautiful women with beautiful hair. He wanted to go inside the hangar to see what was going on, and she told him he didn't want to see anything. After that, he said he never saw her again. (Source: Tim Shawcross, The Roswell File, 1997)

Nurse X candidates--Adeline Fanton & Miriam Bush

David Wagnon (affidavit), who was a young medical technician at the base hospital, remembered the young, attractive nurse fitting Dennis' (and perhaps Pete Anaya's) description. Oddly Wagon also selected the name "Naomi Self" out of a lineup of possible names. However, when shown the known nurses from the base yearbook, Wagnon selected 1st Lt. Adeline "Eileen" Fanton as the nurse he remembered. (photo right) Besides her physical description, many aspects of her history match up with what Dennis ascribed to Nurse X.

Two other witnesses also suggest Dennis may have known Fanton well. Bob Wolf, a minority owner of KGFL radio in Roswell, said it was known that Dennis was seeing a base nurse fitting Fanton's description. Sgt. LeRoy Lang said he trained Fanton in firearms use and saw Fanton and Dennis together on the base on a number of occasions.

Another possible candidate for Nurse X was Miriam "Andrea" Bush, 27-year-old secretary of the hospital administrator, Lt. Col. Harold Warne. In the 2007 book, Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt (Chapt. 12), hers is one of two other witness accounts of aliens at the base hospital besides Dennis'. A picture of Miriam Bush is also in the book (right). Like Fanton, she was short and petite with dark hair.

According to her sister Jean and brother George, Miriam Bush came home one night in a state of total shock. Finally she said that there were a lot of strange medical personnel at the hospital she didn’t recognize and who ignored the regular medical staff. Later Warne would take her to an examination room and she saw several small childlike bodies. One was moving. Their skin was grayish to brown and they were covered in something like white linens. Their heads and eyes were large. The next day she came home and said nobody was ever to say anything further about it. The family thought she had been very heavily threatened. They said the event so traumatized her that it ruined her life. She died under suspicious circumstances in 1989, with bruises covering her arms, but ruled a suicide by suffocating herself with plastic bag tied round her head. (video testimony of Pat Bush, Miriam Bush's sister-in-law, about her death and seeing an alien move.)