CRASH AT CORONA - Stanton Friedman-pages

Page 148 of 242

Page 148 of 242
CRASH AT CORONA - Stanton Friedman-pages

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125 There were armed guards around during loading of our planes, which was unusual at Roswell. There was no way to get to the ramp except through armed guards. There were MPs on the outskirts, and our personnel were between them and the planes. The largest [crate] was roughly twenty feet long, four to five feet high, and four to five feet wide. It took up an entire plane; it wasn't that heavy, but it was a large volume. The rest of the crates were two or three feet long and two feet square or smaller. The sergeant who had the piece of material said [it was like] the material in the crates. The entire loading took at least six, per- haps eight hours. Lunch was brought to us, which was unusual. The crates were brought to us on flatbed dollies, which was also unusual. Officially, we were told it was a crashed plane, but crashed planes usually were taken to the salvage yard, not flown out. I don't think it was an experimental plane, because not too many people in that area were experimenting with planes. I'm con- vinced that what we loaded was a UFO that got into mechanical problems .. . even with the most intelligent people, things go wrong. The C-54 into which Smith helped load the single twenty-foot crate "would have been Pappy Henderson's. I remember seeing T/Sgt. Harbell Elzey, T/Sgt. Edward Bretherton, and S/Sgt. Wil- liam Fortner. Capt. Oliver Wendell "Pappy" Henderson may have been the most highly regarded pilot at Roswell AAF. A veteran of thirty missions in B-24 Liberator bombers in Europe, he participated in the postwar A-bomb tests in the Pacific and earned major commendations for his flying. Henderson kept quiet about the unsettling events of July 1947 for three decades. Finally, he mentioned them to a fellow retired officer, dentist John Kromschroeder, with whom he was then involved in a joint business venture. The dentist said nothing about this until July 1990, more than four years after Henderson's death from cancer. In 1977, Pappy had told Kromschroeder about the incident. He said he transported wreckage and alien bodies, describing the latter as "spacecraft garbage," and adding "the passengers suffered their death." Henderson, in the recollection of RETRIEVAL AND SHIPMENT