Warrant officer and the crates of bodies (1953)

Warrant officer and the crates of bodies (1953)

Date	1953
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Leonard Stringfield
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 47
Year	1953 in UFO history
Timeline	1953 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

The warrant officer and the crates of bodies is an account by an anonymous former U.S. Army warrant officer. He said that in 1953, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, he saw crates holding the bodies of small humanoids that had been recovered from a crash in the Arizona desert. The story was collected by the ufologist Leonard Stringfield and presented in his paper Retrievals of the Third Kind at the 1978 MUFON Symposium.^[1][6] According to Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UFO timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee, the informant said he was in "the right place at the right time when the crates arrived at night by DC-7". He described the bodies as lying on fabric over dry ice, with oversized heads, brown skin, no hair and tight-fitting dark suits, and said one appeared to be female.^[6] No documents support the account, and the informant's name has never been published.

The account

Shellenberger's timeline, citing page 15 of Stringfield's paper, summarises the warrant officer's claims as follows.^[6]

• Arrival. In 1953 crates arrived at Wright-Patterson at night by DC-7, carrying recovered bodies of small humanoids from the desert in Arizona. He said he happened to be "at the right place at the right time".
• The bodies. They lay on a fabric that protected them from freeze burn from the dry ice beneath. Their heads were disproportionately large for their bodies, their skin was brown, and they had no hair. They wore tight-fitting dark suits, and one appeared to be female.
• Tracking. He said he heard that the object had been picked up before the crash by special tracking equipment on Mount Palomar, California.

Stringfield's 1978 paper

Stringfield presented Retrievals of the Third Kind: A case study of alleged UFOs and occupants in military custody at the Ninth Annual MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, in July 1978. It became known unofficially as his first "Status Report", and he went on to self-publish six more up to 1994.^[1][5] A three-part version ran in Flying Saucer Review from the July–August 1979 issue.^[3]

• Format. According to the writer Charles Lear, most of the paper consisted of numbered "abstracts", anecdotal stories from unnamed sources. Stringfield acknowledged that without names they could be "construed as hearsay". He said he had to stand "on the merits of my credibility", built over 29 years of research. Many informants contacted him after reading his 1977 book Situation Red.^[3]
• Common themes. Lear notes that the stories are all similar. Many involve military witnesses blindfolded and driven to a crashed vehicle with alien bodies, and "some involve a witness observing just the alien bodies packed in crates full of dry ice".^[3]
• The composite. In Abstract XXII Stringfield assembled a "composite" description from anonymous medical and military sources. It described humanoids 3½ to 4½ feet tall, with heads large in proportion to their bodies and eyes "slightly slanted, appearing 'Oriental' or 'Mongoloid'". Their skin was grey "according to most observers", though brown, beige and tan were also reported.^[3]
• Roswell. The same paper contained the earliest published version of Major Jesse Marcel's Roswell account, presented as the testimony of an anonymous "Major J.M." of Houma, Louisiana.^[2][3]

Related 1953 accounts

Shellenberger's timeline lists other 1953 stories from the same paper next to the warrant officer's.^[6][7]

• The Fort Monmouth film. A radar technician at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, "Mr. T", said he was shown an unannounced film of a silver disc embedded in desert sand. It showed military personnel without ID patches, the craft's interior, and two small dead bodies on tables in a tent, with large heads and tight pastel suits. Two weeks later an intelligence officer told him the film was a hoax. (See Fort Monmouth desert disc film.)^[6]
• Kingman, Arizona. A project engineer using the pseudonym "Fritz Werner" said in a signed affidavit that he was sent on 21 May 1953 to investigate a crashed object near Kingman, Arizona. He said it had one dead occupant, of dark brown complexion, about 4 feet tall, wearing a silvery metallic suit and a skull cap. The researcher Ray Fowler reviewed his diary, which recorded a "special assignment" that day. (See Kingman UFO crash.)^[7]

The warrant officer's crash in "the desert in Arizona" in 1953 and Werner's Kingman crash share a year, a state and a brown-skinned occupant. They differ on the number of bodies and the suits: one occupant in a silvery suit for Werner, several bodies in dark suits for the warrant officer. The sources read here do not say whether they describe the same event.^[6][7]

Leonard Stringfield

According to the Wikipedia account, Stringfield (1920–1994) directed Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO) and published its newsletter Orbit. In 1957 he became public relations adviser to NICAP under Donald Keyhoe, and from 1967 to 1969 he was an "Early Warning Coordinator" for the Condon Committee. He worked professionally as director of public relations and marketing for DuBois Chemicals in Cincinnati, and died of lung cancer on 18 December 1994.^[1] Mental Floss describes him as a systematic investigator who built a detailed database of sightings. It notes that his 60 volumes of papers were donated to MUFON in 2012.^[4] The researcher Patrick Gross notes that Stringfield was not persuaded that all crash stories were frauds, despite the discredited Aztec story of the 1950s. He collected statements from people "who generally wanted to remain anonymous".^[2]

Assessment

The account rests entirely on an anonymous informant, as reported by Stringfield, who himself conceded that unnamed testimony could be "construed as hearsay".^[3] Lear argues that Stringfield's paper made crash-retrieval research respectable among ufologists, but also helped raise "the tent for the circus" UFO research became in the 1980s.^[3] No document, photograph or named witness confirms a 1953 delivery of bodies to Wright-Patterson in the sources read here. The detail that the crates came "by DC-7" is checkable in principle, but the sources read here do not establish whether a DC-7 was available for such a flight in 1953.^[6]

Notes on the earlier version

• Aircraft and height. The earlier version said the crates arrived "by aircraft" and held bodies "about four feet tall". The timeline specifies a DC-7. Height figures of 3½ to 4½ feet come from Stringfield's composite description, not from the warrant officer's account as summarised.^[3][6]
• "Possibly in Arizona". The earlier version said the crash site was "possibly in Arizona". The timeline's summary states plainly that the bodies were recovered "from Arizona in the desert".^[6]
• The Kingman link. The earlier version said the 1953 Wright-Patterson stories are "often linked" to the reported Kingman crash of May 1953. The sources read here place both accounts in Stringfield's paper but do not themselves link them. Their similarities and differences are described above.^[6][7]
• Air Force denials. The earlier version said the Air Force "has consistently denied holding alien bodies". That is not covered in the sources read here.

People and topics

• Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — The Ohio air base that housed Project Blue Book and is linked to the Hangar 18 legend.
• Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
• Kingman UFO crash — Kingman UFO crash
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.

On the Timeline

• Toronto dematerialization claim (1953) (1953) — An RAF instructor claims he saw a successful 'dematerialization' experiment in Toronto.
• Fort Monmouth desert-disc film (1953) — A radar technician says he was shown a film of a silver disc embedded in the desert at Fort Monmouth.

See every 1953 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

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