Page Content (OCR)
124 Once the material returned to Roswell AAF by Marcel and Cavitt had been sent elsewhere, the army set out to collect what remained at the sheep ranch. A major recovery operation was put into motion, and a large quantity of foil, I beams, heavy paper, black plastic, and other materials were trucked the seventy-five difficult miles to Roswell. Robert E. Smith was then a member of the Ist Air Transport Unit, which operated Douglas C-54 Skymaster four-engined cargo planes out of the Roswell AAF. In a 1991 interview, he described his involve- ment: A lot of people began coining in all of a sudden because of the official investigation. Somebody said it was a plane crash, but we heard from a man in Roswell that it was not a plane crash: it was something else, a strange object. There was another indication that something serious was going on. One night, when we were coming back to Roswell, a convoy of trucks covered with canvas passed us. When they got to the [airfield] gate, they headed over to this hangar on the east end, which was rather unusual. The truck convoy had red lights and sirens. My involvement in the ... incident was to help load crates of debris into the aircraft. We all became aware of the event when we went to the hangar on the east side of the ramp. There were a lot of people in plain clothes all over the place. They were "in- spectors," but they were strangers on the base. When challenged, they replied they were here on Project So-and-So, and flashed a card, which was different from a military ID card. We were taken to the hangar to load crates. There was a lot of farm dirt on the hangar floor. We loaded [the crates] on flatbeds and dollies; each crate had to be checked as to width and height. We had to know which crates went on which plane. We loaded crates on three [or] four C-54s. We weren't supposed to know their destination, but we were told they were headed north. All I saw was a little piece of material. You could crumple it up, let it come out; you couldn't crease it. One of our people put it in his pocket. The piece of debris I saw was two to three inches square. It was jagged. When you crumpled it up, it then laid back out. And when it did, it kind of crackled, making a sound like celophane ... it crackled when it was let out. There were no creases. CRASH AT CORONA