Nick Redfern’s provocative and interesting Roswell book “Body Snatchers in the Desert” (2005) starts with a chapter outlining a conversation he had with a lady (born 1922): while working at Oak Ridge in 1947, she claimed to have seen the ‘aliens’ found at Roswell. However, she said, these were not extra-terrestrials, but were instead Chinese or Japanese people suffering from disabling genetic conditions (e.g. progeria) being used as US military test subjects.
It’s a great story, one that Redfern gamely grapples with throughout his book (and indeed its sequel): but did he actually manage to land any evidential punches linking Roswell to Oak Ridge? Is there any documentary evidence linking the two, even indirectly?
I decided to have a look in NARA…
“The Secret City of Oak Ridge”
The scientific history of Oak Ridge (“The City Behind The Fence”) began with the Manhattan Project, which carried out the research and engineering to build the first atomic bomb. This required the construction of three immense technical facilities:
- “K-25” was a gaseous diffusion plant (“covering a larger area than any structure ever built up to that time”, p.2) operated by 12,000 workers.
- “Y-12” separated Uranium-235 from Uranium-238, and had 22,000 workers.
- “X-10” was a graphite reactor plant, located roughly 10 miles from Y-12.
Founded in 1943, this huge complex was initially called Clinton Laboratories, but was renamed in 1948 to (the now much more familiar) Oak Ridge National Laboratories, by the site’s postwar owners, the Atomic Energy Commission. (AKA “the old A.E.C.” from Tom Lehrer’s “The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be”.)
With all that as background, we can fast-forward to the (2012) NARA document, “Atomic Energy Commission and the Secret City of Oak Ridge“. This lists some of the document sets relating to Oak Ridge in Record Group 326 (mostly at or just below the box level), and mainly covers the period 1943-1946.
The bulk of the records are in the 182 boxes contained in “Series 8505 Formerly Classified Correspondence Files” (ARC number 1518690), which (annoyingly) I haven’t yet found in NARA itself. 🙁 Do any of the descriptions suggest a link with Roswell? Certainly, it would be hard not to notice that Box 104 contains (though without explanation):
List of personnel with clearance, Roswell, New Mexico, 1947
Similarly, Box 130 implies that there was some sustained correspondence between Clinton Laboratories and the Navy’s BuAer (and I’d certainly like to know who was involved at both ends):
Bureau of aeronautics correspondence, 1943-46
The monthly reports in Box 142 might be useful in looking for possible biological / biophysical projects being run at Clinton:
Monthly reports from research division, 1945-47
My understanding is that Monsanto had employees working at Clinton, so it should be no surprise that Box 62 contains:
Technical reports for Monsanto, July 1946
The Archival Limits?
Most of the records listed in the “Secret City” document seem to run no further than 1946, with just a small handful running into 1947. Hence I suspect that the files documented in “Secret City” don’t fully reflect the overall range of Oak Ridge files: perhaps it only reflects the ones held at NARA Atlanta?
More broadly, there are plenty of other record sets in RG326 that could be looked at, such as medical test records: it would take a much deeper trawl to map out these archives in an even remotely satisfactory way. So this is as far as it goes for now… 🙁