50 Years Later, 'Roswell Incident' Described by Old-Timers

ROSWELL, N.M. (June 30, 1997 01:38 a.m. EDT) -- In an old West ranching town, an 80-year-old man with bushy eyebrows sits in his tidy brick house and talks about the time he saw the aliens.

Frank Kaufmann doesn't seem crazy. He smiles often and is warmly polite, if a bit grumpy about the recent influx of UFO buffs.

"You've got these guys coming out of the woodwork," Kaufmann says. "There's people who said they've been abducted, there's women claiming they've given birth to alien babies. That's just a bunch of crap, see."

Kaufmann has his own story to tell.

This is a town where respectable folk -- merchants, military veterans and city officials -- speak candidly about the day in 1947 they heard about or were involved somehow in helping recover the remains of a flying saucer and the bodies of aliens killed in the crash.

Their stories are part of a legend, commonly referred to as "The Roswell Incident," that locals will cash in on this week with an anniversary bash they anticipate will lift the local economy.

Party plans remain on track despite last week's commotion over an Air Force report that said the wreckage came from a weather balloon and the alien bodies were test dummies. The Air Force acknowledged it didn't use dummies in survival experiments until the mid-1950s and explained the apparent time discrepancy by suggesting locals had mixed up their dates.

Fifty years ago, Kaufmann says, he and several soldiers and other civilians working at the Roswell Army Air Field were dispatched to check on reports of a tumbling fireball that had crashed northwest of town.

They found the site easily -- even in the afternoon sun, he says, the glow was visible from the shoulder of Highway 285.

"We were 200-300 yards from the impact area and it didn't look like a plane, it wasn't anything like a missile," he says. "It was kind of a strange looking craft, kind of a horseshoe, almost a Stealth bomber-type shape," referring to the Air Force's bat-winged, radar-evading B-2.

"When we saw what it was, this strange craft and the bodies, we were just shocked," he says. "We radioed in to have body bags sent out, and they were carted off to the base hospital. The craft itself was loaded on a flatbed with a tarp on it and driven right down Main Street to the base."

He describes five dead aliens.

"One was thrown out, it was up against the arroyo; one was half-in, half-out, and the other three were inside," he says.

They had neither big eyes nor long, stringy fingers, he says, but were "trim, good-looking people."

"They were hairless and had kind of ash-colored skin. They were maybe 5-foot-3 or 5-foot-4," he says.

Kaufmann says he and his colleagues "for security reasons took a monkey oath" the evening after visiting the site: "We saw nothing, we heard nothing, we will say nothing."

For 47 years, Kaufmann kept the vow.

Three years ago, as alleged witnesses began speaking up, Kaufmann told his story to authors Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt. He insisted, at first, that his name not be revealed, and in their book, "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell," Kaufmann is named Steve MacKenzie.

These days, after repeating his tale a number of times, Kaufmann is more candid.

"I'm not going to be around much longer," he says. "Folks might as well know."

The first UFO stories out of Roswell came in early July 1947 after the military reported it had recovered a flying disc. Higher authorities refuted the press release the following day, saying the "disc" was a weather balloon. But word was out, transmitted on news wires and printed in papers around the world.

Forty-five miles to the east and within a week of Kaufmann's find, rancher Mac Brazel told reporters he'd found a crumpled mass of strange metal while checking livestock after a particularly stormy night.

It wouldn't tear. It wouldn't ignite. Brazel put it in boxes and took it to the sheriff.

Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox thought the debris might be from one of the air field's planes and contacted the post.

According to period news accounts, officers who went to the site recovered several large pieces of the unusual metal -- along with four or five alien corpses.

Theories abound to explain how wreckage and aliens could have been seen and recovered in different places. One contends two flying saucers collided, showering debris on a ranch and leaving two demolished aircraft and seven alien bodies at two other sites. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, determined in 1995 that records concerning the Roswell base from the late 1940s had been destroyed.

Lt. Walter Haut was the Army Air Corps public information officer who issued the "flying disc" press release. Now 74, Haut says he has never seen a UFO.

Yet he remains a believer.

"There must have been something in the skies at that time," he says. "There's just too much evidence."

Glenn Dennis, 72, is a retired mortician. After lunch one day in the first week of July 1947, he says, he got a call from a man at the military base, asking for several hermetically sealed baby coffins.

"He also wanted to know about procedures for picking up bodies that had been left in the elements for several days, possibly mutilated by predators," Dennis says.

"I asked if I could help. He declined."

--By MARTHA MENDOZA, Associated Press