The One that Got Away
Mike Smith
4 Comments
Share this: del.icio.us | Digg | Google | Ma.gnolia | Reddit | Stumble Upon | Technorati
Maybe it’s the oversized staring black eyes, or the idea that they abduct you from your home late at night, take you into outer space, and do strange things to you, but aliens have always scared me. Give me the bestial extraterrestrials of James Cameron’s Aliens any day; it’s the little grey ones that are truly frightening. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. My name is John LeMay, and I’m from Roswell.
More than 60 years after what is now worldwide known as the Roswell Incident, in which a flying saucer allegedly crashed outside of Roswell in July of 1947, it’s still the otherworldly occupants, and not the strange debris from the crash, that truly haunt witnesses. If you can find a witness today that’s still alive, then they might just tell you of the seemingly unimposing looking 3 ½ to 4 foot tall hairless grey being with oversized heads and large, staring, black eyes. And the fact that they were scared stiff of the strange bodies.
Everyone who saw the creatures was shaken by their appearance, from tough cowboys such as Mac Brazel, to seasoned military personnel, and even a US senator, Joe Montoya. Unimposing the little grey beings apparently were not, but instead roused an intense fear of the unknown. Imagine, then, if one of them peeked into your window one night.
This is what retired US Air Force Master Sergeant and author of popular western novels The Tom-Jack and Tubar , John Tilley, says happened one night at a small outcropping of houses and a trailer court near the Roswell Army Airfield (RAAF) in July of 1947 in his new book, Expose’: Roswell UFO Incident (Corona Crash). Being from Roswell all of my life I had heard most of the basic stories about the Roswell Incident and its alleged alien crew, of which one was supposedly still alive after the crash. This one I hadn’t. With my curiosity firmly aroused I decided to question Tilley further on this intriguing account.
Tilley will tell you himself it’s not a long story, but it’s certainly an interesting one. “The first bit of scuttlebutt I heard when I first arrived at the base in December of ’47 was that something had escaped earlier from the military…made it’s way off field…was peering through residents’ windows and scaring the heck out of them!”
At the time Tilley didn’t think much of the rumors about the crash. “I was only 18 years old. Those B-29s were strange enough, so the word disc and saucer didn’t mean anything to me back then.”
Years later a base historian, Ralph Hieck, would tell Tilley a startlingly familiar story at Tilley’s home in 1993. “So we were sitting at the breakfast bar and Ralf, he started talking about this alien…and the guy was whispering, and there’s just me and him and my wife Inez was the only ones in the house! And he said that it had gotten away from the military at the hospital, and they were searching for it. Well I’m sitting there looking at him thinking, ‘Gee, I heard something like that in 1947.’”
The story in full goes that the alien escaped the base hospital somehow and made its way outside the base gate to an outcropping of small houses occupied by some of the troops and their families. “There were small apartments, and a trailer court, and a store, and a dry cleaners, and things like that, and [the alien] was peering through windows…and scaring the heck out of people like I wrote in my book.” After the alien’s adventure wandering amongst the small homes and trailer court near the base, it made its way back to the front base gate, where it was shot by startled guards.
This incident and others are related by Tilley in Expose’: Roswell UFO Incident (Corona Crash) which was coauthored with his brother Larry Tilley and can be purchased here or here. Tilley was inspired to write the book upon hearing that a worker at the UFO Museum in Roswell erroneously told a visitor that the famous nurse that had drawn Glen Dennis the sketch of the alien bodies was killed in a car wreck north of town, not in a plane crash in England as is usually told by Dennis, who helped to establish the museum. This and other misinterpretations of the facts prompted Tilley to record his own research of the incidents involving the crash.
“I figured, well, I better put something down in writing or it’s gonna all be lost one day,” Tilley said.
As for the rest of the escaped alien story Tilley summarizes the event like this, “That’s not a long story and if a guy speculated on it or extends it they’re gonna have to do a lot of fiction…That’s the thing you’re afraid of, that people are just gonna start fictionalizing a lot of stuff. And then the truth just disappears.” In keeping with Tilley’s comments above, I did my best not to accidentally add to or fictionalize the story as it were, although I really did want to entitle it “Escaped Alien Terrorizes Trailer Park!” Honestly, who wouldn’t?
So in the end did one of the sole survivors of the Roswell crash travel light years to earth only to go around peeping into horrified base residents’ windows at night, only then to be gunned down by the military? If the former event ever happened then the army has certainly done a good job of covering up that story.
Read Part Two of this story here.
View Printer Friendly Version
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments (4)
Contact me through my email address, jplemay@plateautel.net, and I'll be glad to get you back in touch with John Tilley.