Oliver Henderson and the Roswell flight

Oliver Henderson and the Roswell flight

Person	Oliver Wendell "Pappy" Henderson (13 June 1915 – 25 March 1986)
Unit	509th Bomb Group, Roswell Army Air Field
Claim	He flew wreckage (and, in some versions, bodies) from the 1947 Roswell crash to Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio
Told to	John Kromschroeder (1977), wife and daughter (1980–81), old crew (1982)
Affidavits	Sappho Henderson, 9 July 1991; Mary K. Goode/Groode, 14 August 1991
Status	Second-hand family and friends' accounts, given after his death
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, pp. 110–111
Date	9 July 1991
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Military encounters (topic)
People	Oliver Henderson
Year	1991 in UFO history
Timeline	1991 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	9

Oliver Wendell "Pappy" Henderson (1915–1986) was a decorated bomber pilot who flew transport aircraft for the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell. After his death, his widow and daughter signed affidavits saying he had told them he flew the wreckage of the 1947 Roswell UFO crash to Dayton, Ohio, home of Wright Field, and that he had seen the bodies of small beings with large heads.^[1][8] A business partner and some of his old crew gave similar accounts.^[3] Henderson's is one of the two earliest second-hand stories of recovered alien bodies in the Roswell literature, alongside that of "Barney" Barnett. Both surfaced only after the men had died.^[4]

Henderson

• Henderson was born on 13 June 1915. His nickname came from being older than the other men in his wartime squadron and from his prematurely grey hair. In the Second World War he flew B-24s with the 446th Bomb Squadron, completing 30 missions over Germany and earning two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters.^[1]
• After the war he served at Galveston and Pueblo before being posted to Roswell (later Walker AFB), where the family stayed for 13 years. There he ran the "Green Hornet Airline", flying C-54s and C-47s that carried VIPs, scientists and materials to the Pacific atomic bomb tests, a job that required a Top Secret clearance.^[1] Stanton Friedman described him as perhaps the most highly regarded pilot at Roswell Army Air Field, with major commendations for his flying.^[3] A reader's letter quoted by Leonard Stringfield says Henderson was in charge of moving all passengers and freight by air for organisations taking part in the atomic tests and the Manhattan Project. It mentions a letter of commendation from General Carl Spaatz.^[1]
• After leaving the service he ran a construction business in Roswell. He died on 25 March 1986, of cancer according to Friedman.^[1][3]

The story

• Kromschroeder, 1977. According to Friedman, Henderson first spoke of the events to John Kromschroeder, a fellow retired officer and dentist who was his business partner. In 1977 Henderson told him he had transported wreckage and alien bodies, calling them "spacecraft garbage" and saying "the passengers suffered their death". About a year later Henderson showed him a piece of grey, lustrous metal from the wreckage, lighter and much stiffer than aluminium, which they could not bend. Kromschroeder kept this to himself until July 1990.^[3]
• Wife and daughter, 1980–81. Sappho Henderson said that in 1980 or 1981, while they were living in San Diego, her husband picked up a newspaper at a grocery store. It carried an article about a UFO crash outside Roswell with alien bodies found beside the craft. He told her it was a true story, that he was the pilot who flew the wreckage to Dayton, Ohio, and that now it was in the paper he could tell her: "I wanted to tell you for years."^[1] He described the beings as small, with large heads and suits made of a material unlike anything he had seen. She believed he said the bodies had been packed in dry ice.^[1]
• Their daughter said that in 1981 her father showed her a newspaper article and told her he had seen the crashed craft and the bodies, and had flown the wreckage to Ohio. He described the beings as small and pale, with slanted eyes and large heads, humanoid but different from us. She thought he said there were three. She also recalled him saying, while they looked at the stars, "I'm looking for flying saucers. They're real, you know."^[8]
• Old crew, 1982. At an Air Division reunion in Nashville in 1982, Henderson reportedly told members of his old bomber crew the story in his hotel room. One recalled only that he flew the plane to Wright Field and that the bodies were "small and different".^[3] Friedman also spoke to Henderson's son and a cousin, who said they had heard the story after the newspaper article appeared.^[3]
• Stringfield. Leonard Stringfield heard of Henderson around Labor Day 1988 from a reader in Hawaii. The reader passed on the account of a Maui resident who said her father, Captain O.W. Henderson, had flown the retrieved craft to Wright Field on a B-29.^[1] The reader's letter, not Stringfield, said the story appeared in the tabloid Globe on 17 February 1981. The earlier version of this article attributed that identification to Stringfield.^[1] Stringfield phoned Sappho Henderson on 1 October 1988. She told him her husband had kept the secret until 1981 and had described the object only as "strange".^[1]

The affidavits

• Sappho Henderson signed her affidavit on 9 July 1991 before a notary in Los Angeles County. She said she had not been paid, and that her husband had not known of the book The Roswell Incident when he told her.^[1] The Shellenberger timeline summarises it under that date.^[9]
• The daughter's affidavit was signed on 14 August 1991 before a notary in Douglas County, Nevada.^[8] Her name appears as "Mary K. Goode" in the transcription and as "Groode" in Friedman's book and the timeline.^[8][3][9]
• The statements belong to a collection of Roswell affidavits gathered by the Fund for UFO Research in 1991–93 and published in The Roswell Events (1993). One assessment calls the bodies thread the "weakest tier" of that collection, because it consists of accounts given 44 to 46 years after the event.^[5] Another compilation reproduces the Henderson-related affidavits and also mentions the researcher Karl Pflock's suggestion that Henderson was a "practical joker".^[7]
• Another 1991 affidavit backed up the flight. Robert Shirkey, who in July 1947 was a first lieutenant in base operations, said that besides the B-29 and B-25 flights to Fort Worth, a third flight, a B-29 piloted by Henderson, went directly to Wright-Patterson. He said he "learned later" that bodies had been laid out in Hangar 84 and that Henderson's flight carried "all that material".^[6]
• Sappho Henderson refused to let investigators search her husband's very large collection of papers for the metal fragment.^[3]

Assessment

• Every account is second-hand. The affidavits were signed in 1991, five years after Henderson's death and 44 years after the events. The story reached Stringfield through a chain of intermediaries.^[1][5]
• Inconsistencies. The earlier version of this article said the versions differ on whether the destination was Wright Field or Dayton. Since Wright Field is in Dayton, the two are the same place.^[3] The real differences are elsewhere. The Hawaii letter and Shirkey say a B-29, whereas Robert Smith of the 1st Air Transport Unit thought a crate he helped load went into what "would have been Pappy Henderson's" C-54.^[1][6][3] Kromschroeder and the crew say he carried bodies, while Friedman concluded that Henderson "probably saw bodies at the airbase" but "may have transported only materials".^[3]
• Timing. The earlier version said skeptics note that Henderson apparently told the story only after Roswell became famous in the late 1970s. The family's accounts do tie his telling to a 1981 newspaper article.^[1][8] Kromschroeder, however, dated his first conversation to 1977, before Jesse Marcel's 1978 interview revived interest in Roswell.^[3][4] Kromschroeder only came forward in 1990.^[3]
• Wider context. The Air Force reports of the 1990s concluded that the Roswell debris came from Project Mogul, a balloon programme to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The 1997 report said accounts of bodies matched procedures for recovering parachute test dummies.^[4] Prominent UFO researchers, including Pflock and Randle, became convinced that no bodies were recovered at Roswell.^[4] Supporters see Henderson's as a significant family account from a pilot in a position to know.^[3][7]

People and topics

• Oliver Henderson — Roswell transport pilot who reportedly told his family he flew crash debris and bodies.
• Roswell incident — The July 1947 recovery of debris near Roswell, New Mexico, announced as a "flying disc" and then explained as a weather balloon.
• 509th Bomb Group — The nuclear-armed bomber group based at Roswell in 1947.
• Roswell — The New Mexico town at the center of the 1947 crash story.
• Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — The Ohio air base that housed Project Blue Book and is linked to the Hangar 18 legend.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.

On the Timeline

• Navy linguist and the Soviet crash report (July 1991) — A Navy linguist says he decoded a Soviet report of a crash split between England and Germany.
• NRO Blue Fire document (28 July 1991) — An alleged NRO document warns of UFO-group protests near Area 51.

See every 1991 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Roswell incident”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.