Fame from outer space

J. Bond Johnson is one of this newspaper's most famous photographers. He has been portrayed in Hollywood films and documentaries and discussed at length in magazine articles and on blogs and other Web sites. His photos have been a prominent exhibit for almost two decades in a museum that draws 150,000 visitors a year.And they are "the most frequently requested images from our Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection -- really from all of our photo collections," said Brenda McClurkin of the University of Texas at Arlington Library of Special Collections. "I just sent one to Australia."That's because on a warm afternoon in July 1947, Johnson, at the age of 21, took the only known photographs of the supposed remains of the UFO crash near Roswell, N.M. -- and then forgot all about it until researchers came looking for him more than three decades later.They made Johnson, by then a Methodist minister, something of a celebrity as they argued over his photos and espoused theories of vast government conspiracies and intrigue.

Thanks to modern technology, Johnson, who died last year, remains at the forefront of the ufology world, said Julie Shuster, director of Roswell's International UFO Museum and Research Center. Cigars and cigarettes fed a cloud of smoke above typewriters and black rotary phones in the Star-Telegram newsroom in July 1947. There was no air conditioning.Phil Record, who later rose to associate executive editor, was a copy boy at the time. He remembers Johnson, but not much about the Roswell photos."I don't really recall it being a big story," said Record, who retired in 1997.But he said reports of UFOs were common."There were a lot of people who would swear, 'I saw something,' but they wouldn't tell anybody because they would come off as being nuts," Record said.