- Note - Our personal thanks to Kenny Young
for permission to post his outstanding interview on this site.
-
-
- The first anyone has heard of Larry Rogers
and Curt Robinson was from a fleeting newspaper article announcing that
they had an incredible secret to tell.
-
- The article, which appeared during the
50th year anniversary festivities of the Roswell Incident, was seen in
the July 6, 1997 edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer. Courtesy of columnist
Jim Knippenberg, the brief report told of two Cincinnati-based engineers
who had a most remarkable discovery to announce to the world: the REAL
truth behind the famous Roswell Incident.
-
- Since that time, little has been heard
of Larry and Curt. Sure, they have been contacted by numerous researchers
eager for a morsel of what they claim to have, vying for a tantalizing
tidbit of their truths. But they have not talked.
-
- Both Larry and Curt have been busily
researching Roswell, making preparations for the stunning disclosures they
promise to reveal in 'Ice Man Down.' Their research is secretive, unnoticed.
They have spent many hours quietly conducting library investigations, they
have repeatedly traveled from Cincinnati, Ohio to Roswell, New Mexico.
-
- Their lips have been sealed... until
now.
-
- The twosome, declaring a stunning revelation
to end the mystery surrounding an alleged crash and secretive military
recovery of a Flying Saucer in Roswell, New Mexico of 1947, now announce
that they have completed all of their preparations to launch the book which
they co-author, 'Ice Man Down.'
-
- Larry Rogers is from Terre Haute, Indiana,
born in 1950 and graduated from college in '72 with a degree in electrical
engineering. Curt Robinson is from Michigan, born in 1946 and has a degree
in engineering from Michigan State University. He has been married for
30 years with 4 children.
-
- The interview takes place in the third-floor
suite of an office complex in Blue Ash, Ohio on October 8, 1998. Also present
for the interview is Chris Coffey and her fiancee Danny Russell. Aside
from being a close friend and fellow investigator, Chris was also a personal
secretary to the late UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield, whose early research
laid the groundwork for the 'crashed saucer' lore and The Roswell Incident.
-
- KENNY YOUNG: Tell us about your interest
in the Roswell Incident and how you became involved with this drama.
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- CURT ROBINSON: My prior interest came
from the standpoint of having read a book about it. I found it an interesting
subject. Anything that's scientific in nature and theory I have an interest
in. You should see my library. It seemed like that Roswell book had a lot
of factual data, so that's why I bought it. One day we began talking about
Roswell -- what happened there -- what we thought might have happened there.
-
- Anyhow, I was planning a family vacation
to Costa Rica. I asked Larry to come along. But the subject of Roswell
began to dominate the discussion. We each started reading anything we could
find on the topic. It finally got to the point one day where Larry just
said Let's just go to Roswell and see what it's like. Just to say we've
been there, walk on the soil... Breath the air they breathed... So we scrapped
the Costa Rica vacation idea and went to Roswell. The kids were disappointed,
but on we went. That's how it started.
-
- KY: So once out there you stumbled onto
something.
-
- LARRY ROGERS: Not the first time. On
the first trip back in 1996, we came away from there wondering 'what the
heck is all this about?' because it wasn't what we had expected. You've
seen the stuff on TV shows and read the books about the crash site and
how you can tour crash sites, right? Well, we go out there and drive into
downtown Roswell and there is the UFO museum, just as we expected. At that
time, we had no idea of writing a book -- never thought of it. We weren't
writers, obviously, but we were curious -- how could there be more than
one crash site? In fact, we came back from Roswell confused.
-
- LR: We were humored by things like the
dueling museums each having their own crash site. We thought we would get
up to the Ragsdale crash site and there would be a popcorn stand up there
and the FBI would be selling hot-dogs. It was hard to take much of this
seriously on that first trip. We were both disappointed and confused. This
was a case of coming back from all the disillusionment and going back to
the books, asking 'how does this guy come to this conclusion while this
other guy over here is going down this track? And the interesting thing
about it is they trash each other... it was a real mess out there. We started
to see new things the second time around. We decided to set up a spreadsheet
and put each of these in a computer database. We wanted to see if there
was some pattern to the way one writer would draw one conclusion, while
another writer uses the same witnesses and goes off in a totally different
direction.
-
- In about October of 1996 we had decided
to go back, because we had wanted to see the crash site where the owner
would take you out on the land. We found it too coincidental that the one
museum sends its customers to a crash site located in a national forest
where there is no issue with a land owner -- that was a little too commercial
for us. We wanted to see both sides of the story. So on that second trip
we called the owners of the crash site referenced in the Randle and Schmidt
books -- Hub and Shiela Corn. The site is located about seven miles off
of Route 285, north of Roswell.
-
- CR: And in the meantime we had already
started quite a bit of research, some out of curiosity, trying to follow-up
and figure out what was wrong with this whole picture.
-
- LR: We began that trip at the University
of New Mexico map center. We thought it would be cool to get some contour
maps of various areas so we could take notes on where we had been and what
we had seen. We went to the Engineering building where a real surprise
hit us. The name of the map center...
-
- CR: MAGIC. It stands for Meteorological
and Geological Information Center. Right above the door, real big letters.
We got a chuckle out of that.
-
- LR: We spent a whole day there copying
maps. At the end of the day, we rolled them all up, put them into two large
tubes, and left. We spent that night in Albuquerque. Then we met Shiela
Corn, she took us several miles to the crash-site, where we could immediately
recognize the huge basin that has been a part of many television programs.
There's a marked trail with stakes and rope all along it to keep people
on the trail. Up on the rocky wall at the far end of the basin, they have
placed small American flags. This is supposedly where the aliens died.
-
- KY: Is there one site everyone agrees
on?
-
- CR: Yes, everyone agrees that something
happened at the Corona debris field. It's just a matter of WHAT happened
there. You have that site, the Corn Ranch site (Randle and Schmidt) which
is 35-miles southeast, and the Capitan Mountain (Ragsdale/museum) site,
which is essentially southwest of the Corona debris field, roughly 25 miles.
-
- CHRIS COFFEY: Do you make a correlation
between these sites?
-
- CR: Yes. Socorrow and the Plains of St.
Augustin -- they both sit on the 34th parallel latitude. They are almost
on the exact same line as Corona. So, we're looking at many debris fields
and many different theories. Some say two objects collided, going down
in different places. That's what is so confusing to us. How can you have
all of these so-called true stories that are so different?
-
- CC: With differing dates and the number
of bodies...
-
- CR: The number of bodies vary, but we're
not talking about bodies here. We're looking at where this thing happened,
that's the part that blows your mind. How can all this be? How could Barney
Barnett say that he saw this at a certain time over there and Ragsdale
with Trudy in the back of a pickup truck see something someplace else?
Something has got to be wrong here... unless we had a whole series of UFOs
all run into trouble, crashing all over the place.
-
- LR: Instead of just picking up one book,
we reviewed many. They all say different things, one guy says not to believe
what the other guy says. We started wondering: why would Barnett lie? Why
would Ragsdale lie? And we began wondering...
-
- CR: What if they are ALL telling the
truth? We have these camps, the Corn Ranch camp with Schmidt and Randle,
and the San Augustin Camp with Friedman, and you have the Ragsdale Camp...
what if they are all telling the truth? Is that possible? And we're not
just talking locations, we're talking what they saw.
-
- KY: So you had the locations, the general
layout of different stories. What enabled you to connect these elements
and draw a larger picture?
-
- LR: The thing that stood out was how
none of these witnesses profited from their testimony. I don't think Ragsdale
lied, I don't think Mac Brazel lied about Corona, I don't think Barney
Barnett lied about the Plains of San Augustin, and I really don't think
the people at the Air Force Base lied about what they saw. I don't think
you have any liars here, because nobody profited. There's no motive to
lie...
-
- CR: That's probably how we were able
to solve it -- by assuming that the people closest to the events were not
lying, but were in fact telling the truth. We didn't belong to any camp.
We looked at this from a purely scientific standpoint, from a factual standpoint.
And when you ask how they could all be telling the truth, then your mind
begins to work. Then you can make some ground when you forget about what
side you're on. When Larry and I are done here, we'll have a whole lot
of people going down the right track, and that's scary for some people.
-
- LR: What he's eluding to is a lot of
continuous disinformation out there. There are some liars out there now.
But if you take the original people who were interviewed then, I don't
think any of them are lying.
-
- CC: Do you think it's extraterrestrial?
-
- CR: Something definitely crashed. There's
no doubt about that. There is a little bit for everybody in this story.
While researching this story, we had a lot of strange things happen to
us, things that were somewhat unexplainable. Those strange things seemed
to be leading us.
-
- LR: So anyhow, we were driving up the
side of a mountain. Understand that this part of New Mexico is totally
flat except for about two spots, one of them is a mountain range around
Albuquerque. In the southern part of the state there is one bump, and you
can see that for miles, it is Capitan Mountain, the Ragsdale crash site.
After talking with Shiela that morning, we were impressed that we had finally
seen the crash site.
-
- CR: We thought we were in a position
where we could zero in, but we wanted to give the Ragsdale site one last
look.
-
- LR: We wanted to take some measurements
-- prove to ourselves that Ragsdale must have seen something else, the
crash couldn't have happened there.
-
- CR: We had gone through a whole series
of mathematical computations. We were trying to explain this from a scientific
standpoint, to determine how an event could occur at the Ragsdale site
and so forth. Right now, we're beginning to think that there may not be
much merit to the Ragsdale site - at least from the standpoint of the UFO
crash.
-
- LR: So we're way out there in this 4-wheel
drive jeep going up the side of this mountain on a two-track dirt road
hoping we don't meet someone coming along in the opposite direction. Then,
all of a sudden, Curt slams on the brakes. It's straight down one way and
straight up the other way, nothing but scrubby brush everywhere you look.
He throws the door open, gets out and starts up through the brush. I'm
sitting there in the passenger's seat wondering what did I miss?
-
- CR: It was colder than hell, too.
-
- LR: So he starts hollering at me, so
I get out and start looking for him. I finally found him, and it really
was pretty amazing. We were looking at each other and saying this is really
bizarre.
-
- CC: Did you actually see something?
-
- LR: We brought it back to Cincinnati.
-
- CC: But how did you know to find it there?
-
- CR: I was just driving along, stopped
and I looked. Jumped out of the vehicle, left the door open. It's just
one of those mysterious things.
-
- LR: Something just caught his eye.
-
- CR: Honest to goodness. I just felt like
I had to get out of the vehicle and there it was. It was about 50-feet
from the road.
-
- LR: When you think about the scrubby
pinion pines and brush and all that kind of stuff. To be honest with you,
if I were standing there and somebody had said that there was something
really bizarre within 20 feet of me, I would have never seen it. You would
just have to look at it in the right way, and (LR slaps his forehead) it
all comes to you.
-
- CR: It was a sign, that's what it was.
It was a sign, so we continued on up the mountain.
-
- KY: So you retrieved a physical artifact?
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- CR: Something.
-
- KY: Was this something man-made?
-
- CR: Yes.
-
- KY: If I poked at you for details, would
you be responsive?
-
- CR: We wouldn't tell you. Not right now.
-
- LR: It's material to this whole thing.
It definitely fits. I will tell you what some of the other artifacts that
we brought back were.
-
- CC: Did you know when you saw this artifact,
though, that it would have some impact on what we have been fed and told
all along?
-
- LR: Yes, it definitely fits. There's
so much that happened this one day that by the end of the day I was sitting
in a restaurant shaking.
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- CR: He was shaking. He was absolutely
shaken. He was so scared, but I wanted to go back, because while we were
up there, we found something REALLY bizarre. I wanted to go back that night,
but Larry said: "There's no way you're going to get me to go back
there."
-
- LR: So the weirdness went on. We go on
up to the rock, and you have to understand that the way you recognize the
Ragsdale site is by this unique rock there with a crack through it. We
spent about an hour at this one site picking up stuff and throwing it in
the back of our jeep. We then go on up the side of a mountain and try to
remember where this rock is. The first time, we had a countour map that
showed us where this rock was and it still took us an hour to find it.
You have to be looking right at it to see it.
-
- CR: We're talking about the side of a
mountain with this countour map and we kept going in and out trying to
find it for over an hour, so it was remarkable that we found the rock.
Most people don't find it.
-
- LR: So we go on back up to the site,
and we're still fumbling around although we've already been there once
looking for it. We finally find it and we use the rock as our centerpoint.
I had a notepad with me and Curt had a notebook with him. We sit on the
rock and discuss what we're going to do there -- about taking some measurements,
compass bearings, or whatever. Suddenly, we hear this noise. There is a
rustling sound coming from the brush. At first, we thought it must have
been a BIG animal.
-
- CR: You can't see real well in there,
because of the brushy growth.
-
- LR: Then out of nowhere here comes this
guy -- hiking real fast, jogging right up to us, holding a Jim Ragsdale
book like the one we had purchased on our first visit to the museum. He
says: "Aha, so zis must be ze place! I zee vee zeek ze zame zing!"
-
- CR: Can you believe this? Now this guy
has this book open, a Jim Ragsdale book, and he's running. He comes running
up through the trees and we're standing there looking at him.
-
- LR: Remember, we told you that this place
is hard to find, so this guy, we assume, must have been looking for it
for quite a while. He comes up to it, takes a peek at it, and (LR snaps
his finger) out of there he goes.
-
- CC: Did he come from Germany?
-
- LR: Yes, he was German.
-
- CR: Here this guy drives a minimum of
50-miles from Roswell on this 4-wheel-drive road and suddenly leaves after
5-minutes. He disappears. He didn't even stay.
-
- LR: So we went on and spent a couple
of hours up there, at the end of our day, we find him parked nearby in
a white Buick. Why would he come all the way out there, 53-miles, walk
through all this brush to find this rock, look at it for a few seconds,
then go back and sit in his car for two hours?
-
- So at that point in time, we worked away
from the rock. Based upon what we've read concerning Ragsdale, we were
thinking that most likely this is not the real site. But, we wanted to
prove it for ourselves. Curt is thinking that if anything really did happen
at this site in 1947, knowing how hard it would be to get it all cleaned
up, any evidence would not be found way up at the site - it was just too
high up. The event occurred 50-years ago. Whatever was left behind would
be washed down the side of the mountain by now. So, we decided that our
best chance of finding stuff would be to start working our way down the
mountain, examining the stream beds and kicking rocks over to see what,
if anything, might be wedged between or under the rocks. So we work our
way down a little bit. We use our hands to check under these things. It
looks like a moonscape up there -- many huge boulders. We get our hands
down into the loose soil and leaves and pine needles to see if there was
anything down in there. Suddenly there is something. What is that?
-
- We come out with a crumpled up mess of...
well, something or another, and we're knocking the leaves and sediment
off of it. There is some small printing on it -- and what do you suppose
it is? It was a very old decayed C-ration wrapper. There were several of
them, actually.
-
- KY: What do you believe is the significance
of finding C-ration wrappers at this location?
-
- CR: It told us that somebody had used
military C-rations there. We thought it quite interesting that we found
it there. We found some them at locations up near the rock, too.
-
- LR: So, picture this. I'm standing there
scratching my head over this find. I head back to the rock to get my note
pad and start taking some notes.
-
- CR: Now, understand that this is the
Ragsdale crash site, the site that the larger UFO Museum claims to be the
site of the crash. We were asking each other why we are finding this stuff
here?
-
- LR: Why hadn't the museum people been
out here to look around? To us, it looked as if we were two of only a very
few people who had found the place.
-
- CR: They didn't bother to go out and
look.
-
- LR: If they were so proud of this site,
you'd think they would've had all this stuff hanging on their wall. This
stuff points directly to some possibility of a military encampment or operation
here many years ago.
-
- KY: Now again, you're talking about the
Ragsdale site. Hasn't the Ragsdale account been discredited?
-
- LR: In their later books, Randle and
Schmidt have discredited the account. The museum people will tell you that
this is the real crash site. It just happens to be on Federal property,
where there is no issue concerning who holds the rights to take tours.
So anyway, I go back there, and I sit down on a smaller rock next to the
big rock. I am taking some notes while Curt is taking measurements and
looking at compass bearings -- we were trying to determine where northwest
was. I am in somewhat deep thought, sort of day dreaming, when I notice
something lying on the ground not more that five feet away. I don't believe
this, I think to myself.
-
- This large rock has a curved shape at
its very bottom. I see a shiny object back up under the edge of the rock,
just where it meets the ground. I holler for Curt, to tell him to come
and look at what I had found. I pick this thing up. I have it in my hand
and tell Curt You're not going to believe what I found under that rock.
I open my hand to show it to him, and he says I'll be damned. Where did
you find that? I take him back and point to where I found it. I kneel down,
and point to the exact spot. Amazed, he says Well there's another one.
-
- CC: Could this stuff have been planted?
-
- LR: Well, we wondered the same thing.
It certainly appeared old, although we found it in plain sight. It was
just located in place that you would not normally look. Remember, I was
taking notes. I was in one of those trances you get into when trying to
put down in words something that is not easy to explain. The only reason
that I noticed it was because my stare happened to be in the right direction.
Remember that first thing we found while driving up? We could tell that
thing had interacted with nature over a number of years. We know it could
not have been planted, at least if it was, it happened many, many years
ago. There was a lot of decay involved. The second things we found could
have been planted, I suppose, but I don't know why anybody would do that.
-
- CR: You wouldn't plant the things we
found. They don't fit the story in such a way that it would make sense
to plant them.
-
- LR: To us there was no apparent connection
to the story, except for one bizarre twist that occurred to me over dinner,
later that night. That was the point at which I got a bit shook up. Let's
just say there would be NO WAY that THAT belonged there.
-
- CR: About that time, we find something
else. I'm not going to tell you what we found, only because right now,
it's best we not. If people knew about it, there might well be a stampede
up there. All we will say is that while we were there, we made a new discovery...
-
- LR: We were walking back toward the road,
ready to leave.
-
- CR: It was quite bizarre. I wanted to
go back, later that night, under the cover of darkness. It was wild.
-
- LR: We drove into Roswell, and it was
pretty late. We went to a nice steak house in Roswell. I think it was around
10 o'clock. I was ready to have this day be over, but as we always do at
the end of a day like that, Curt and I were discussing the artifacts we
had brought back. I thought perhaps we should turn over one thing in particular
to the local law enforcement authorities.
-
- CR: We won't tell you what it was, but
Larry thought the right thing to do would be to turn it in.
-
- CC: Turn it in for what reason?
-
- CR: We're not going in that direction,
period. We can't tell you.
-
- LR: I just felt like we shouldn't have
left the state of New Mexico with this in our possession. I really wanted
to get rid of it... I just didn't want to have it.
-
- CR: He was chicken, that's what it was
all about. Then we found something else up there, a couple of things up
there, before we left.
-
- LR: Don't call me chicken. You were wanting
to go back and here I'm wanting to go to the police and turn this stuff
in... I was really a basket case.
-
- CR: When we get to the site, strange
things start happening to us. All of the strange things which happen fit
into the overall mystery, so to speak, but only Larry and I know that as
we sit in this room. It fits into the mystery -but has nothing to do with
the mystery- yet IS part of the mystery.
-
- LR: As we sat there in the restaurant
at the end of the day, we didn't see things as we do now. After we reflected
upon it, we began putting things into perspective.
-
- CC: You had made a comment to us once
that this case will one day be included in history books.
-
- CR: Yes, it could change history as we
know it.
-
- LR: As far as what becomes history, let
me tell you about a similar situation concerning a man by the name of Paul
Brown, who writes on-record that, while a patient in a military hospital,
he witnessed the tearing-off of the front-pages of The Honolulu Advertiser
on Saturday, November 30, 1941. He happened to acquire one of those front
pages, and included it in a letter to his parents. Of interest is the headline:
it said 'JAPS MAY ATTACK OVER THE WEEKEND.' The U.S. Military ordered all
of the front pages of this day's newspaper torn off, but did nothing to
increase the security of the base. Some twenty years later, Brown is going
through his deceased mother's belongings, and finds that she had kept all
the letters that he had sent home during the war. He wonders about that
newspaper. He finds it. It turns out to be one of only two original copies
now in existence. The other belongs to the archives of the State of Hawaii.
Does this event re-write history books?
-
- CR: You don't see history books re-written
right now, do you? Let's put it this way... if you or I were writing the
history books, they would be changed. How's that?
-
- LR: That story I just related to you
is true. It has changed the way I think about 1941. Now, have I read in
history books that the United States government was looking for a reason
to get into The War? No. Public opinion must be positive about it, the
leaders felt. What better way than to be attacked? We basically had big
signs that said 'drop your bombs here.' Oh, by the way, some darned reporter
had to find out about it, so darn him, we had to tear off the front pages
of his newspaper.
-
- CC: Could you see a similarity in the
way history presently views Pearl Harbor and how we will one day think
of Roswell?
-
- LR: Even after fifty years, things can
happen that really change the way you look at certain events.
-
- CR: Yeah, you can certainly change history
as what is fact... if you care to believe it. In order to write a history
book, all you have to do to write it is to believe it.
-
- KY: Are your findings factually based
or subject to interpretation? Will your readers come away knowing for sure
that your findings are in order?
-
- LR: There is a lot of history in our
book. A lot of documented history, and here again, based upon the person
that believes history, I guess, the reader will find the book extremely
factual.
-
- CR: We haven't been able to disprove
anything we present, how's that?
-
- CC: How will you feel after the book
has been reviewed, and you are confronted for this evidence. Are you going
to be forthcoming with your findings?
-
- CR: Once the book comes out, we'll not
hold back any punches. We'll say: There it is. There you go. Is it history
or isnt' it? You'll have to decide.
-
- KY: Let's address the weather balloon
story. Are you comfortable that this explanation was or was not satisfactory.
-
- LR: Oh, it's all a cover story. It's
all a cover story.
-
- CR: So was Project Mogul. That's a cover
story. The crash dummies and Case Closed, that's all a cover.
-
- KY: Any comments on Lt. Col. Phillip
Corso and his sworn affidavit?
-
- CR: Well, he passed away. He was entertaining.
When you bought his book, you spent your money and got something entertaining
to read. He does have some historical data in his book, that is positive.
-
- CC: Did you have any reservations about
coming out with this story, either out of fear or obligation?
-
- CR: I am not 100% sure that any of us
really NEED to know what REALLY happened at Roswell. We're not sure that
people should really know that. The more we researched, the bigger Roswell
got. We couldn't find the edges, as if it were a puzzle that kept getting
bigger. We think we solved the mystery. We found something.
-
- CC: Will this damage the reputations
of historical figures? Such as General Ramey?
-
- CR: If Ramey said it was a weather balloon,
and we say it wasn't a weather balloon, does that damage him? Sure it does.
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