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Randle and Schmitt bolstered their tale with accounts by Roswell witnesses, some of whom had earlier been ferreted out and interviewed by Friedman. The most notable of their sources was Glenn Dennis, who in 1947 was 22 and working as a mortician. Dennis told of receiving inquiries from the air base that July about the availability of child-size coffins and procedures for embalming bodies that had been exposed to the weather for days.
Even more intriguing, he claimed that he had seen strange activity at the base hospital early in July and had been ordered to leave after encountering a hysterical Army nurse, who later told him she had aided doctors performing autopsies on strange-looking, small bodies. The nurse, he added, had sworn him to secrecy and had been transferred to England, and flown out of the base shortly after they spoke. Later, he said, he heard that she had been killed in a plane crash.
Dennis, who still lives near Roswell, claims that until 1990, the only person he ever told about the strange goings-on was his father. Why? "I didn't want to get mixed up in this mess."
Friedman, meanwhile, was pursuing a new lead. His preoccupation with UFOs had landed him a stint as adviser for a 1989 episode of the TV show Unsolved Mysteries that dealt with Roswell and other purported UFO crashes, including the one that ostensibly occurred in 1947 on the Plains of San Agustin. One viewer of that show, Gerald Anderson, responded quickly to an 800 number flashed on the screen, protesting that the re-enactment of the event was inaccurate. For one thing, he told the operator, the shape of the crashed spacecraft was wrong. And how did he know? Anderson, now a resident of Springfield, Mo., explained that he moved to New Mexico with his family in 1947, when he was five, and that on a rock-hunting outing on the Plains of San Agustin, the group had come across the wrecked craft.
Friedman was ecstatic. This seemed to be solid confirmation of the story casually mentioned in The Roswell Incident. He arranged to have John Carpenter, a Springfield therapist, interview Anderson. Carpenter, who also directed investigations for the local chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, conducted several sessions with Anderson, often using hypnosis, presumably to help him "recover" buried memories of the event. Anderson later told the Springfield News-Leader: "We all went up ...to it [a large silver disk]. There were three creatures, three bodies, lying on the ground underneath this thing in the shade. Two weren't moving, and the third one obviously was having trouble breathing, like when you have broken ribs. There was a fourth one [that]...apparently had been giving first aid to the others." Soon after, Anderson claimed, the military arrived, warned everyone to forget what they had seen and "unceremoniously ushered" the civilians away from the site. And why hadn't Anderson ever told his story before? As he grew into manhood, he explains, he "tucked" away the memory. "I learned you just don't go up to the average person on the street and say, 'Damn, know what I saw?'"