Crash Dummies

Report: Roswell 'aliens' were Crash Dummies
CNN Interactive, June 24, 1997

A new Air Force document being released on Tuesday reportedly says that so-called space aliens allegedly sighted in the New Mexico desert in the 1940s were actually Air Force dummies used in high-altitude parachute drops.

Philip Klass, publisher of a UFO skeptics newsletter, said the Air Force report concludes that people who reported seeing alien bodies at a crash site near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 were actually recalling dummies they saw in the 1950s. Klass said he saw the report. Air Force public affairs officers refused to discuss its contents in advance, although word of the conclusions circulated widely in the network of UFO buffs. Retired Air Force Col. Richard Weaver edited the report for the Air Force.

Karl Pflock, a UFO researcher who does not believe the Roswell incident involved either a spacecraft or alien bodies, said Monday he had not read the report. However, he questioned the Air Force's theory that those who claimed to have seen the crash debris and the alien bodies could have mixed up the crash, which was in 1947, with dummy parachute tests that took place as much as a decade later. Frank Kaufmann, now 81 and one of the few witnesses to the so-called "Roswell Incident," still insists he saw dead aliens put into body bags after their spacecraft crashed near the town 50 years ago. But the Air Force has repeatedly denied the claims and says it has no evidence of alien spacecraft or that there has been any UFO cover-up.

Time Magazine's report: Did Aliens Really Land?
By Leon Jaroff, June 23, 1997 VOL. 149 NO. 25