Anne Robbins
One of the latest of these second-hand witnesses to talk about this was Anne Robbins whose husband T/SGT Ernest Robert Robbins told her about his brush with the alien creatures near Roswell when he was stationed there with the Army. Robbins, according to what his wife said, never talked much about the incident, but did provide some information.
They had been to dinner at the NCO Club at the Roswell Army Air Field and had gotten home late. They were already in bed when the telephone rang ordering him back to the base. He was gone for about eighteen hours and when he returned, his clothes were wet. He said that he had been through a decontamination process at the base before he had been allowed to leave. He didn’t really tell her why that had been necessary or exactly what the decontamination had been.
Anne wanted to know what had happened and he told her, reluctantly, that there have been a flying saucer crash outside of Roswell. She didn’t believe him but she still asked questions about it. She learned that the craft was saucer shaped and that there was a top layer that was oblong and had windows in it, at least according to what she remembered.
Robbins told his wife that there had been three beings on the craft. He used the word people. One was dead and two were alive. Later he would tell his son that the creatures had pear-shaped heads with large black eyes and brown skin. In a break with traditional descriptions, he said that they had no nose and no mouth.
And that was about all he would say about it to them. He followed, for the most part, the orders not to talk he had been given in 1947.
Frankie Rowe
Robbins wasn’t the only person to report that there had been survivors. Frankie Rowe, a young girl in 1947 and whose father worked for the Roswell Fire Department told me that her father had been on a fire run outside of Roswell when he saw the wrecked alien ship. She also said that she had handled debris from the craft. Skeptics have dismissed her testimony saying that it has been discredited, but the truth is, their criticisms of her are without merit and saying something is discredited is not really the same as discrediting it.
As just a single example, some have said that her tale of the Roswell Fire Department response to the crash is untrue because the site of the wreck is outside of Roswell and the fire department didn’t make runs outside the city limits. This came from a former city council member who was not on the council in 1947 but who stilled lived in Roswell in the mid-1990s.
To check this out, I went to the Roswell Fire Department and asked them about runs outside the city. One of the fire fighters asked what they were supposed to do. Let it burn? But what was true when I was there in 1992 might not have been true in 1947, so I looked at the log books that go back into the 1920s. The truth is the Fire Department did make runs outside the city as the fire logs show so it is not outside the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, there is no log for this particular run. For those with a conspiratorial turn of the mind, the claim might be that the Army managed to get the entry of that specific run removed so that there would be no documentation if anyone ever looked.
Rowe, who has granted several interviews, told her story in depth to me in January 1993. She said that her father had come home after his shift at the fire station (which lasted about twenty-four hours) and had something important to say. He then told them, according to Rowe, that they had gone about thirty miles outside of Roswell and then a few miles back to the west. He said there had been some kind of a crash and that he had called it a spaceship or a flying saucer or something.
Then she said one of the most important things. According to her, “I remember him saying that some of them helped pick up some pieces of the wreckage. He said he saw two bodies in bags and one that was walking around.”
She said, “…he said he was sure that there were bodies because the third one would go over to them… he talked about [how] this third one would go back and forth between different parts of the wreckage and was walking around dazed. He didn’t say if anyone tried to talk to this person.”
The creatures were, according to what Rowe remembered, about the size of a ten year old, meaning that they were smaller than a human adult. The color was like that of an insect called Child of the Earth (more commonly called the Jerusalem Cricket) which is sort of copper colored or maybe a sort of dark brown.
Rowe also saw a bit of metallic debris that a New Mexico State Trooper claimed to have picked up in the field. Rowe said that she thought it was about a week later. She’d had some dental work done previously and there were complications from it. She was in Roswell to have it repaired and when she finished at the dentist, she had gone over to the fire house to wait so that her father could drive her home.
The State Policeman came in while she was waiting to go home. He walked up to a table and said to the firemen, “You guys aren’t going to believe what I’ve got.” He pulled out his hand and had a piece of metal.
Rowe said, “I think I got to pick it up and crumple it one time. I can only remember doing it one time… It just didn’t feel like anything… it was kind of a pewter color… Everybody got out their knives or whatever and tried to cut and they tried to burn it.”
There is one problem, with all this, however. According to Rowe, she’d had some oral surgery which had begun to bled, which was why she had been in Roswell in the middle of July 1947. That was why she had been at the fire house when the State Policeman had brought in the metallic debris. She had gone in so that the dentist could treat her. Although records are not complete, there are none to show that Rowe’s oral surgery was done in July 1947 or that there were later complications as she suggested. I, and others, have been unable to confirm the dental work. While this is what she remembered, the reason for her being in Roswell could have been something more mundane and she forget about it.
Unfortunately, as has happened so often in this case, no researcher had a chance to talk with Rowe’s father to get his first-hand observations. He died long before the investigation began. But I did have the opportunity to talk with her sister, Helen Cahill. She was married in 1947 and living in California at the time of the crash, but had heard some discussion about the events during a visit to New Mexico in 1960. Although her information wasn’t as complete as that of Rowe, it confirmed, for what it’s worth, that Rowe did not invent the tale of the crash. Of course, it does little to validate it, except to suggest that Rowe’s father was talking about a UFO crash long before the reports of the Roswell events came to light and at a time when few people thought of UFOs as being from other worlds. Other explanations seemed to make people happier.
Beverley Bean
Adding to this mix of second-hand stories of survivors of the crash is Beverly Bean, a pleasant English woman, who told researchers about her father, Sergeant Melvin Brown who had been stationed at Roswell in 1947. Unlike some of those who have told stories about Roswell, Brown is in the Yearbook (just like a high school yearbook that contains the pictures of about 80 % of everyone assigned to the base) that Walter Haut created in 1947. It is a document that allows us to verify that a soldier did, in fact, serve at Roswell during the critical period without having to gather information from the records center in St. Louis.
Like so many of the others, Brown didn’t tell his story to investigators and it didn’t surface until after Jesse Marcel began talking of the crash in 1978. Interestingly, one of the documents offered by Bean to prove her father served in Roswell was an order with several names on it including Jesse Marcel.