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By Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt
The late Len Stringfield, who was the first researcher to take UFO-crash retrievals seriously,
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Leonard Stringfield (1920-1994) was the first UFOlogist to take crashed-saucer stories seriously. His contacts in the medical field gave him the first descriptions of the alien bodies allegedly recovered at Roswell.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LEONARD STRINGFIELD.
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met with a doctor he described as his "prime medical contact." From that source he heard detailed descriptions of the recovered alien's body structure.
Later, Stringfield was able to talk with a doctor who had participated in an autopsy of an alien body. This new witness, according to Stringfield, provided a great deal of additional data. "From him, in time, I was able to envision the body entire," Stringfield said. "I learned of its internal chemistry and some of its organs — or, by human equation, the lack of them."
Stringfield, working from such statements by his medical sources, was able to draw a number of conclusions. According to Stringfield, the being was humanoid, three-and-a-half to four feet tall. It weighed about 40 pounds.
The alien's head was proportionally larger than a human head. The alien's body had two large, round eyes, though one source did suggest the eyes were "Oriental or Mongoloid, deep-set and wide apart." Its nose was vague, with only a slight protuberance. Its mouth was a small slit and opened only into a slight cavity. The mouth apparently did not "function as a means of communication or as an orifice for food ingestion," and there were no teeth. There were no ear lobes or "protrusive flesh extending beyond apertures on each side of the head."
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A 1978 composite drawing by Len Stringfield of an alien humanoid, based on information he received from doctors who performed an autopsy on the bodies recovered outside Roswell.
BY PERMISSION OF
THE ESTATE OF LEONARD H. STRINGFIELD.
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The alien body had no hair on its head, though, according to Stringfield, one of his sources said that it was covered with a slight fuzz. In fact, there wasn't much hair on the body at all.
The neck was thin, as was the torso. The arms were long and thin and the hands reached close to the knee. The hands, according to Stringfield's sources, had four fingers and no thumb. "A slight webbing effect between fingers was also noted by three observers," he wrote.
"Skin description is not green," Stringfield continued. "Some claim it was beige, tan, brown or ... pinkish gray, and one said it looked almost 'bluish gray' under deep-freeze lights. ... The texture was described as 'scaly' or 'reptilian' and as 'stretchable, elastic or mobile over smooth muscle.'" He noted that, "Under magnification, I was told, the tissue structure appears mesh-like... . This information suggests the texture of the granular-skinned lizards, such as the iguana and chameleon."
Melvin E. Brown, a sergeant with the 509th Atomic Bomb Squadron at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947, told family members that he had seen the bodies recovered at Roswell when he was given the task of guarding a number of them after they were placed in the rear of a military truck. According to Brown, they were smaller than humans, and their skin was yellowish-orange in color and had a texture like that of a lizard — leathery and beaded but not scaly. Given the circumstances of his opportunity to observe the bodies, the discrepancy between his and Stringfield's accounts of the color and texture could have been the result of decomposition or simply a difference in lighting conditions. Regardless, it is intriguing that Brown spoke of lizardlike skin, as Stringfield's sources did.
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Sgt. Melvin E. Brown, 509th Atomic Bomb Wing, K Squadron. He was in the truck that brought the bodies back from the crash site to Roswell AAF. He claimed that he looked under a tarp and saw the alien corpses.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE INTERNATIONAL UFO MUSEUM, ROSWELL, N.M.
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Further confirmation of autopsies has come from another source.
Dr. La June Foster, a renowned expert and authority on human spinal-cord structure who had a practice in San Diego in 1947, was called on to perform a special assignment for the military. She did not travel to Wright Field, but went to Washington, D.C., where she stayed for approximately one month. During Foster's absence, Dr. Laura Henderson filled in for her at the San Diego clinic.
Because Dr. Foster had worked undercover for the FBI during the Second World War, and because she already had a security clearance, she was flown to Washington to examine the spinal structures of the bodies retrieved near Roswell. She reported that it was possible that one had been found alive but critically injured. According to Foster, it had been rushed to Washington, where it soon died of its injuries.
Foster saw one or two of the bodies. Her task was to check their bone structure, spinal cords and vertebrae, and to make comparisons between them and human anatomy. Like the other doctors who saw the bodies, Dr. Foster described the beings as short, with proportionately larger heads than those of humans. She said they had "strange eyes."
According to family members, Foster was very upset upon her return from Washington. As she had been debriefed, she had been told that if she talked about what she had seen she would lose her license to practice medicine and that she risked being killed. "Someone in the government is trying to keep me quiet," she often said.
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