There are numerous Roswell witness statements that mention what the ‘Roswell aliens’ (who I would instead call ‘test subjects’) found in the ‘capsule’ were wearing, but these are spread throughout the (already very diffuse) literature. Hence I thought it would be helpful to wrangle them all (unless you know of any others?) into a single place: so here they all are.
(As an aside, Jim Ragsdale’s account was just not credible enough to go on the list, in case you’re wondering.)
So, what do witnesses say that the ‘Roswell aliens’ were wearing?
- Joseph Montoya (Carey & Schmitt, “Witness to Roswell”, p.92)
- “Each wore a silvery, tight-fitting, one-piece flight suit”
- Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox, quoted by Inez Wilcox, quoted by Barbara Dugger (1995)
- “They wore suits like silk.”
- Captain Oliver Wendell “Pappy” Henderson, quoted by Sappho Henderson
- “He said the material that their suits were made of was different than anything he had ever seen.”
- “Clothing was of material unlike anything he had seen before.”
- “Cactus Jack”, quoted by Iris Foster, in Kevin Randle, “UFO Crash at Roswell” (p.115)
- “Their blood, according to Cactus Jack, was like tar, thick and black, and stained their uniforms. Cactus Jack was positive that they had been wearing silver uniforms.”
- Anonymous archaeologist, speaking to Kevin Randle in 1990, “UFO Crash at Roswell” (p.116)
- “It was wearing a silvery flight suit and had one arm bent at a strange angle, as if it had been broken.”
- Barney Barnett (in 1950), reported by Vern and Jean Maltais, in Berlitz “The Roswell Incident” p.55
- “Their clothing seemed to be one-piece and gray in color. You couldn’t see any zippers, belts or buttons.”
- Mary Ann Gardner’s patient (1975), quoted in Tom Carey’s “The Continuing Search for the Roswell Archaeologists: Closing the Circle”, in IUR vol 19, No. 1 (1994):
- She described them as being small in stature with “big heads and slanted eyes” and wearing silvery flight suits.
- Gerald Anderson (in “The Roswell Report: Case Closed”, Appendix C) [now thought to be unreliable]
- They were wearing one piece suits. All of them were dressed exactly the same. It was sort of a real shiny silverish gray color.
- Q: No zippers, buttons?
- A: No, I saw no zippers, no buttons.
- Q: Insignias?
- A: No, no insignias. The only thing that was different, you know, and they all had this, but the only that was different from the silvery gray thing, the suit, was that down like a seam line, like there was a seam on his shoulder and around the collar it was trimmed in what appeared to be maroon, like cording.
- Then the suits were continuous with their footwear. We could see right this area down, it seemed to be less pliable then it was up here, like this was a stiffer area, like they were boots or shoes or something. But they were all dressed exactly the same.
Update: add the “Guy Hottel” memo to the list, why not?
Thinking about it, I should perhaps also add the description given in the (in)famous Guy Hottel memo. Though this has been spun and re-spun a thousand or more times, it should really be here:
- Mr <redacted> informant, reported by Guy Hottel, head of the FBI’s Washington field office (1950)
- “Each [flying saucer] was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”
Nick, is it possible to give dates for when each account was given? It is so easy for a witness to be influenced by what everyone else has said – so that for example ‘grey and shiny’ can be re-remembered as ‘silver-grey’ and then becomes ‘silver’.
Very likely irrelevant, but as far as shiny fabrics go, glass-fibre fabrics are a curiosity from that about that time .Light-weight but said to be both warm and fire-proof. How seams were treated, I don’t know. Here’s a general article on it from the Smithsonian..
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-do-you-wear-a-gown-made-of-glass-marvel-at-the-eye-catching-history-of-this-unlikely-fashion-trend-180986998
Diane: that’s a good question, but I’m currently following a path of posts to try to get me to a point where I can – finally – lay out a clear exposition of what exactly I think happened outside Roswell in 1947. The idea is for each of these posts to be like a lemma supporting the final post. I initially thought it would take 5 or 6 but… clearly I was wrong.
Bear in mind that I currently know of only one person in the world who thinks this is what happened (i.e. me), so I have an overwhelmingly vertical cliff face to climb as far as even laying out my theory goes, let alone anything else.
Nick,
Deeply empathise with your situation.
Also – on a completely different matter .. if you ever feel inclined, I’d appreciate a review from you of the ‘Naibbe cipher’ Voynich paper recently published in Cryptologia.
Diane: I’ll try to have a proper look at the Naibbe cipher
Diane: I’ve just watched the Naibbe Cipher presentation. It seems to take the whole unigram-bigram thing I was working on in 2004 or so, and then weaponise it into a cipher system, using 13 playing card suits to try to fake the stats distribution. It’s fun, but about as useful as Gordon Rugg’s stuff. Which is to say, not very.
Cryptologia. ” Naibbe cipher “. I’ve read that too. And the only thing that’s correct there is . So the ” Homophonic substitution. Otherwise it’s misery.
Nick,
Thanks for the quick response re Naibbe cipher, which has gained much approval in comments shared on the various social media platforms.
Diane: basically, the Naibbe Cipher deliberately uses a mix of unigrams and bigrams (which is good), but pretty much everything around that is overfitted (which is not so good). This yields a triumph of correlation over causation, but nobody seems to want to say that.
**Voynich Manuscript**
Many published theories about the Voynich manuscript are nothing but empty constructions – statistical tricks, pseudolinguistic fantasies, or pure speculation. They all share the same fundamental mistake: they ignore the text itself. That is a fatal error.
With Voynich, the text must actually be read. It is not enough to look at the characters or count their frequency – the manuscript is designed as a *quiz* that must be solved. Without this step, its meaning will never be revealed.
And the crucial fact: the entire text is written in Old Czech. Anyone who does not know this language cannot understand the manuscript. That is why all attempts relying only on statistics or modern linguistic projections are doomed to failure from the very beginning.