extraordinary%20encounters

84 Dead extraterrestrials
had performed autopsies on alien corpses.
One, a physician who “served on the staff of a
major hospital” (Stringfield, 1980), provided
a detailed account of an autopsy, in the early
1950s, of a humanoid reminiscent of the
gray-skinned, big-eyed entities that would figure
in abduction lore in later years. Stringfield,
who died in December 1994, never revealed
the names of these individuals, so
independent investigation of their stories and
status proved impossible. Nor would his family
provide investigators with Stringfield’s files.
None disputed Stringfield’s integrity, though
some questioned his judgment in taking such
extraordinary testimony at face value.
Lecturing in London on April 14, 1979,
American occultist and channeler James Hu rtak
declared that a flying saucer had crashed
as early as 1946. His source, he said, was a
colleague who had participated in the re-
t r i e val. The crash occurred near Great Fa l l s ,
Montana. “The bodies we re shipped to the
Ed w a rds Air Fo rce Base facility in California,”
Hu rtak claimed. “It was determined
that the green hue on the bodies was due to
the nature of the chemistry of the fuel system.
After extensive studies the bodies we re
put on ice and sealed in aluminum canisters”
( Hu rtak, 1979).
In the late 1970s, a Minnesota schoolteacher,
William L. Moore, and a nuclear scientist
and UFO lecturer, Stanton T. Friedman,
got interested in an incident that to
most was an obscure footnote: a brief flurry of
excitement in early July 1947 over the supposed
recovery of a “flying disc” near Roswell,
New Mexico. The story had hit the presses
only to be contradicted in a matter of a few
hours, when the U.S. Army Air Force announced
that it had all risen out of an absurd
Display showing a dead alien autopsy (with models) at the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico (Peregrine
Mendoza/Fortean Picture Library)