Roswell-area helicopter crash claim (1954)

Roswell-area helicopter crash claim (1954)

Date	12 April 1954
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Leonard Stringfield, Linda Moulton Howe
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 51
Year	1954 in UFO history
Timeline	1954 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	9

The Roswell-area helicopter crash claim is an account by an anonymous former U.S. Air Force serviceman, identified only by the initials "KA". He said that on the evening of 12 April 1954, while training on helicopters at the air base at Roswell, New Mexico, he was flown with a rescue crew to the crash of a disc-shaped craft in the desert 25 to 30 miles northwest of the base. There, he said, he saw small dead bodies around the wreck.^[6][4] He also described being threatened, debriefed and later discharged for talking about it.^[6] The account was published by the ufologist Leonard Stringfield in his UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence – Status Report III (1982). It was reprinted in 2005 by Linda Moulton Howe on her Earthfiles website, and appears in Michael Shellenberger's 2024 timeline for Congress.^[1][4][5][6] No document or named second witness supporting the story appears in the sources read here.

How the story came out

• Stringfield's status reports. Leonard Stringfield (1920–1994) was an American ufologist with a particular interest in crashed-saucer stories.^[1]
  • He had run the group Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO) and was public relations adviser to NICAP from 1957.^[1]
  • He self-published a series of "Status Reports" on alleged UFO crash-retrievals from 1978 until his death in December 1994. Status Report III, UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence, was written in June 1982.^[1][4]
• Classified "A". Stringfield divided his cases into two kinds.^[4]
  • Reports from people who said they had seen the events themselves were classed "A".^[4]
  • Second-hand or intermediary information was classed "B".^[4]
  • The KA account appears among the first-person "A" reports.^[4]
• A lecture in 1982. According to a report by Fred Schaefer that Stringfield included, KA had suffered nightmares on and off since 1954. They grew worse during 1981. At a lecture at the Edmund Scientific Company in March, KA saw a chance to tell his story to someone who would listen, which helped ease his distress.^[5] Shellenberger's summary says Stringfield listened to KA and believed him.^[6]
• Earthfiles reprint. In March 2005 Howe reprinted Status Report III in parts on Earthfiles. The KA material appears in Parts 2 and 3, though the full text is only available to subscribers.^[4][5] Part 2 opens with a quotation from a "USAF Search and Rescue Photographer, New Mexico, 1954", describing the craft and four small bodies.^[4]
• The earlier version of this article described the witness as a helicopter crewman in training. Shellenberger's summary says KA had begun helicopter training at Roswell. The Earthfiles heading calls him a search and rescue photographer, and in his own account he was there to take photographs.^[4][6]

The account

• Call-out. KA said he served in the Air Force in 1954–55 at Roswell Air Force Base, where he began helicopter training.^[6] On the evening of 12 April 1954 he was ordered to the flight line because of a crash in the desert. His crew was designated "Rescue 4".^[6]
• The craft. The crash site lay 25 to 30 miles northwest of the base, over a lake.^[6]
  • KA described a metallic saucer that had crashed edgewise into the sand, with a dome in the centre.^[6]
  • In the quotation used by Earthfiles, the dome was stationary but the outer rim was still spinning anticlockwise, with the lights on its outer edge rotating the same way.^[4][6]
• The bodies. What startled the crew most, in the witness's words, was the sight of four small bodies lying outside the craft, "motionless" and apparently dead.^[4]
  • Shellenberger's summary describes them as 4 to 4½ feet tall, with large heads, tight-fitting dark blue uniforms and no helmets.^[6]
  • More bodies were inside a small hatch in the disc. The occupants seemed to have tried to crawl out on their hands and knees.^[6]
• The ground crew. A ground crew in fatigues was already at the site. Its members kept the helicopter crew back and began tagging the objects and bodies.^[6] They wore green fatigues with no insignia or rank.^[6]
• Photographs. A second helicopter landed with four men in white trousers and long white coats.^[6]
  • When KA tried to photograph them, one told him: "don't take a picture of me, just take what you were told to take".^[6]
  • He also saw a silver, aluminium-coloured metal box on the ground, about 3 feet long and 1½ feet high, with printed numbers and some unreadable words. When he tried to photograph it, the ground crew told him to "get the hell away from that".^[6]

Aftermath, as KA told it

• Debriefing. Back at Roswell, KA said, he was debriefed for three days in Building No. 5, which he called "living hell".^[6] Men in civilian clothes and black ties, who said they were "intelligence officers", told him not to talk. They read him a law providing for fines, imprisonment with hard labour and a general discharge if he did.^[6]
• Hangar 18. KA heard that the saucer was taken onto the base and put in Hangar 18. He said the hangar was expanded over the next two weeks with refrigeration equipment and sophisticated computers.^[6]
• A second crash. He also heard a rumour at the time that another UFO had crashed near Bandelier, New Mexico, on 24 April 1954.^[6]
• Punishment and breakdown. KA said he was then sent back to Sampson Air Force Base. His superior accused him of being absent without leave and punished him.^[6]
  • When KA explained about the crash, the superior did not believe him.^[6]
  • KA then had a nervous breakdown and spent three months in hospital. There, he said, he was given an injection that made him feel drunk and was questioned about the crash recovery by four or five people.^[6]
• Discharge. On the day he left hospital, KA said, he was taken to the base commander's office and discharged by a colonel on 7 March 1955, because he had told his sergeant about the crash.^[6]
• Later warnings. KA said a stranger in a neighbourhood drugstore later told him not to talk about his part in the events. After a phone call he made in January 1982, he was called and warned of the consequences.^[6]

Assessment

• No corroboration found. The witness is known only by his initials. The sources read here give no documents, other witnesses or physical evidence supporting the account.^[4][5][6] The earlier version of this article said "no records or other witnesses confirm it" and that the account "doesn't match any known Air Force accident". The second point is not covered in the sources read here.
• The publishers. Both people who put the account into circulation were prominent believers in crash-retrieval stories.
  • Stringfield spent his later years writing about alleged recoveries of alien craft and bodies.^[1]
  • Howe is a journalist and documentary maker best known for her claim that aliens are behind cattle mutilations, and for speculation that the U.S. government works with aliens.^[2] In 1983 a man identifying himself as Air Force Sergeant Richard C. Doty showed her fabricated documents at Kirtland Air Force Base; Doty later said, "We gave Linda some good information, and some bad information".^[2]
• The Air Force's dummy explanation. In June 1997 the Air Force released The Roswell Report: Case Closed by Captain James McAndrew.^[7]
  • The report said the "alien" bodies some people reported in the New Mexico desert were test dummies carried aloft by high-altitude balloons for scientific research.^[7][8]
  • It said reports of military units recovering a flying saucer and its "crew" were really descriptions of Air Force personnel recovering the dummies.^[8]
  • The 2024 AARO historical report lists Project High Dive, a 1950s programme that used dummies on large balloons to study how pilots coped with ejecting at altitude.^[9]
• Gaps in that explanation. Shellenberger argues that Case Closed did not deal with the dozens of affidavits Roswell witnesses had published over the previous fifty years.^[7]
  • The earlier version of this article named Project Excelsior alongside High Dive. It also said critics noted that the dummy drops began a few years after some of the claimed sightings.
  • Neither point is covered in the sources read here, and none of them applies the dummy explanation specifically to the 1954 account.

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Roswell — The New Mexico town at the center of the 1947 crash story.
• Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Linda Moulton Howe — Journalist and filmmaker who runs the Earthfiles website and has reported many crash-retrieval claims.
• Earthfiles — Linda Moulton Howe's website.
• The Roswell Report: Case Closed — The Roswell Report: Case Closed

On the Timeline

• JANAP 146(C) (10 March 1954) — Directive JANAP 146(C) covers UAP reports and bars civilian pilots from discussing them.
• Navy FLYOBRPT reporting instruction (1954) (23 July 1954) — A new Navy directive orders UAP sighting reports sent to several intelligence commands.

See every 1954 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

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