Interview with Kevin Randle
By, Richard Thieme

RT: Why are scientists’ horizons so narrow?

KR: It may be the fault of UFOlogy. Very few people embrace science, and it has an anti-intellectual bias. In France, they claimed that “rocks fall from the sky,” and everyone laughed, but the next year, they examined the rocks and said, yes, they do fall from the sky. When the coelacanth was found, they changed their minds. We’ve always been plagued by the lunatic fringe, contactees and their kin. They reject the study of cattle mutilation, Mute Evidence, for example, and continue to tout cattle mutilation a la Linda Moulton Howe. They don’t want to see the evidence.

Some secrets are well kept. Roswell is a self-keeping secret because of ridicule. They think you’re the lunatic fringe. We DO have people who come forward and talk about it –but are they trustworthy? If someone does come forward, we don’t know how to take it.

RT: How did you get into all this?

KR: I was well versed in science fiction. I waffled as to whether or not there was something to it. The Condon committee could not win, but now we can prove it’s a whitewash. In 1976 Robert Cornet and I went to look at the Project Blue Book files before it was sanitized. We took photos of what we thought were the important papers. Knowing people bring all kinds of baggage to visual observations, I concluded there was little evidence for saucers as ET spacecraft. So I was looking through my notes and realized that Blue Book was in fact filled with all kinds of cases that were inexplicable. They say they solved all but 700 cases. But 4000 of them were labeled, not explained, “insufficient data for scientific analysis.” And if you did not complete their entire form, they labeled it “incomplete data,” but they told you the time date and details and they could have investigated them. The Air Force hammered a square peg into a round hole. This was all before we found the Hippler letter and realized the Condon committee was a set-up.

I decided I needed to talk to Bill Brazel, Mac Brazel’s son. He told me all the things he was reported saying were true and he had not been misquoted, he had seen this stuff. This launched me into the Roswell investigation.

So the whole thing could not be dismissed outright as misidentification.

RT: it seems to come down to the credibility of the people we’re speaking to.

KR: I thought I could tell before Don Schmidt blew up and turned out to have been lying about important things. When I interview people I assume people are telling me the truth as best they know it until I learn differently.

RT: Who if anyone do you think is a reliable Roswell witness?

KR: In today’s environment, I say we need to eliminate all civilian witnesses and concentrate on the military, because so many civilian witnesses are unreliable. Glenn Dennis. The nurse story blew up, not because of anything the skeptics had done, but because of our work. Schmidt engaged Paul McCarthy to look for the nurses (Omni story) and I said, didn’t you go to St. Louis first? He said yes. And you have documentation? Oh yes. But the records never showed up. There was no nurse.

Glenn Dennis, the mortician, is not telling the truth. Frankie Rowe’s story has expanded. I find nothing to suggest she is not telling the truth as remembered – family members corroborate parts of her story – but I reject that story because she was 12 years old and she’s a civilian witness. I just reject them all out of hand now. Jim Ragsdale – a great story, the ship crashing to earth. Like The Blob or Invaders form Mars. Then Ragsdale changed his story under financial inducements from Roswell businessmen.

I look to Col. Blanchard’s staff. Every staff officer we have interviewed – not the pilots, not the navigators, but the people on the staff, the adjutant, the intelligence officer, the provost marshal, the high ranking guys – with one exception they have said yes, the story is true, and it’s extraterrestrial.

If people come forward after everything has been made public, it’s not as credible. With people like Easley, they were probably asked to swear an oath which was meaningful, they would not need to threaten anyone with death.

We have heard from some people that they have been shown incredible gun camera footage of UFOs. Are they being shown that to gauge their reaction to extraterrestrial craft?

RT: What is the single most compelling incident or aggregation of data that stands out for you?

KR: I am still very impressed with the officers form the 509 Bomb Group that we interviewed. Easley. Patrick Saunders, who wouldn’t answer any questions but bought a copy of the book – a number of copies for friends, and signed the flyleaf, “This is the truth, but I never said a word about it.” That’s a way he could affirm the truth without violating the oath. And Edwin Easley talking to him, the first words out of his mouth to me were, “I can’t talk about it, I was sworn to secrecy.” I specifically asked about the alien space craft and he said he was sworn to secrecy. What could have happened in 1947 that he would still be sworn to secrecy? To me, that was very compelling. Or sitting in a room with Doctor Currey Holden. Granted, the guy is 96 years old, not the sharpest guy, he is still living at home. I could have pressed a point of view on him but I tried to come at it from a negative point of view so he would go for the negative if he was getting cues from me, but he didn’t, he went with the positive. His story was confirmed by a number of other people. He didn’t come to us and say yes, I was the archeologist, we came to him through other people. These are people who do not come to us, we go to them, we search them out, and I am more inclined to accept their story. They are not looking for the spotlight. And as I said, every member of Col. Blanchard’s staff except one, I think it was Payne Jennings, said this thing was extraterrestrial.

I said to Easley after we had talked several times on the telephone, are we following the right path? He said, what do you mean? I said, we think it‘s extraterrestrial. He said, let me put it this way: that’s not the wrong path. In a couple of places I have paraphrased it so it’s more positive than he expressed it, but he clearly believed that it was extraterrestrial.

Jesse Marcel, I have seen the tape, he said this is something that wasn’t built on earth but it came to earth. He was amazed at what he saw. If it was a weather balloon or a radar reflector or Project Mogul he would have recognized it. He would have said it was a balloon. Sheridan Cavett just flat-out lied to us. I wanted all the information before I talked to him so I could have it all. The only time I saw him get nervous was when we were talking about what went on at the impact site and he said, did Bill Rickett tell you that? He was obviously nervous, he leaned forward in his chair, picked up and threw down a magazine, we had asked him about the bodies, and I said no it was Edwin Easley and he reacted visibly and I knew I had blown it. I should have said yes but I was trying to protect Bill Rickett who was alive then, he was Counter Intelligence, FCIC, to Cavett being OIC. When Cavett was interviewed by Weaver, he said it was a balloon, he recognized it immediately as a balloon. Weaver was investigating Project Mogul. The follow-up question should have been, Cav, did you communicate this to Jesse Marcel rather than letting him think it was an alien spacecraft? and go off and tell his story? Clearly Weaver and Cavett agreed what they were going to talk about before he turned on the tape.

There was no reason for Easley to say it was extraterrestrial, no reason to say he was sworn to secrecy, all he had to say was, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I talked to a General who was at Foreign Technology in the mid-sixties. The General said, I don’t know who you are or what’s classified and what’s not and I am not going to talk to you. I got the impression from Easley that here was a secret they wanted to share but they felt obligated to keep the oath they took in 1947.

Pappy Henderson when he saw the story in one of those tabloid newspapers handed it to his wife and said I wanted to tell you this for years so I guess now it’s not classified. Sappho has never changed her story. Very nice very sincere lady, no reason to be telling this story, and she said he told his friend, the dentist, and he said, yeah, he told me that. We interviewed members of his flight crew and he told them as well. He shouldn’t have said anything, it was still classified but he was not trained in security work, he was a pilot.

RT: Where is Roswell going to go now?

KR: We have hit a brick wall. Easley is dead, so is Rickett and Cavett, all we have are taped interviews and notes. Cavett’s story changed as we talked to him. We’re chasing the paper trail now. Fine tuning the story. Eliminating civilian witnesses will give us a better case. The attempted character assassination of Jesse Marcel is ludicrous. There’s just nothing there. I found his interview with Bob Pratt from the National Inquirer disturbing. Marcel said he had degrees that universities say he did not. We can not verify his undergraduate degree. But the tape is erased and all we have are Pratt’s notes.

I still file FOIA requests, and they’ll say they have no records responsive to my inquiry.

RT: What’s the bottom line now for you, Kevin?

KR: I believe that we have been visited by alien creatures. I believe the number of visits has been much smaller than the UFO community would like us to believe, I don’t believe they have been around for the last fifteen years, but I believe they will come back, especially when we are taking our first tentative steps into space. We were isolated in our solar system and are now beginning to look for ways to get out and they want to be sure we don’t pose a threat to them. To me, the evidence has been persuasive, not only testimony from reliable people (understanding how testimony can be influenced by all sorts of outside effects) but also the physical evidence that has been recovered, limited though it is. The Washington National case in 1952 is very illustrative. Machines seeing what people are seeing – radar and people all over the DC area and some of the photographic evidence. There are some extraordinary photographs that defy explanation.

RT: Such as the he McMinnville photographs?

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