On the road to Roswell: Stanton Friedman

This is the first in a special series of Raiders News Network interviews focusing on the 60th Anniversary of the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, UFO Incident: HORN: Stanton, Roswell is the pre-eminent story of Ufology. Some say whatever occurred near Roswell, NM, in July 1947 will never be known. Others like you disagree on some levels. You and Bill Moore brought this story to light many years ago. This is the most appropriate place to start this series, so please tell us how that happened. STAN: I first heard of Roswell in the early 1970s from a woman named Lydia Sleppy whose son was a forest ranger in California .He had had a good sighting. My associate (Bobbi Ann Slate Gironda , long deceased) and I spoke with him and he suggested we talk to his mother who had had a good sighting near Albuquerque. We did speak to her and after she told us about the sighting, she mentioned that when she had been working at an Albuquerque Radio Station in the late 1940s, she was asked to type the story coming in from a broadcaster at their Roswell affiliate station for a newswire. He dictated how a flying saucer had been recovered and was being sent to Wright Field. Part way through the story the bell went off on the machine she was using to put the story on the news wire. The FBI instructed her not to continue the transmission. She remembered the names of some of the people and I located several, but came to a dead end. I should stress that New Mexico was a hotbed of classified Research and Development activities and certainly it was expected that there would be spies and counter intelligence concerns.

In 1978 I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at a TV station to do three interviews before my lecture "Flying Saucers ARE Real!" that evening at Louisiana State University. I had done two, but the third reporter was nowhere to be found. The station manager was giving me coffee, looking at his watch, and was embarrassed as he knew the person who had brought me to the station and that I had other things to do. Out of the blue he told me that the person I ought to talk to was Jesse Marcel over in Houma, Louisiana. I asked "Who is he?" He answered "Oh, he handled wreckage of a flying saucer when he was in the military. We are old Ham radio buddies." The reporter finally showed up and I was busy the rest of the day. Next day from the Airport I called information and then spoke with Jesse who told me his story. This is described in detail in "Crash at Corona: The Definitive Story of the Roswell Incident" by Don Berliner and myself and available from my website at www.stantonfriedman.com. Jesse didn't have a precise date. I shared the story with Bill Moore (we had known each other in Pittsburgh, years before). I also saw him months later in Minnesota the day after meeting with Vern and Jean Maltaise of Bemidji, MN, who told me a story of their friend Barney Barnett who had come across a crashed saucer and strange bodies in New Mexico. Bill had a 3rd story (From the Flying Saucer Review) about an English actor named Hughie Green who heard a story on the radio about a New Mexico crashed saucer when driving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He could pin down a date (early July, 1947). Bill went to the U. of Minnesota Library and found the stories in newspapers in the periodicals department. These gave us an independent check on Jesse's story and the names of many more people . By 1980 we had located 62 people. That is when the first Roswell book "The Roswell Incident" by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz was published. Bill and I did 90% of the research. By 1986 we had published several more articles and the total was up to 92. This was all before the internet made searching a lot easier and cheaper. I instigated, and was in, the Unsolved Mysteries NBC TV program about Roswell in 1989. It was well done and was seen by 28 million people.