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Posted on 05/17/2003 12:01:07 PM PDT by Quix
Anne Robbins now lives in Midland, Texas. She's the widow of a career military man who was stationed in Roswell during the Roswell crash in July, 1947. She remembers the description of the saucer that her husband, Technical Sergeant Ernest Robert Robbins, told her he helped recover and the three small beings that were found outside the craft. Now 84 years old, Robbins has never before spoken publicly about Roswell, but she now says that what her late husband saw was not a downed weather balloon.
Seated in a meeting room at the Odessa Meteor Crater Museum, she said, "We had been to a dinner party at the NCO [non-commissioned officers] club on the base and didn't get home until 10:30 or 11. We'd already gone to bed but weren't yet asleep when everything outside lit up like it was daylight. It was like that for what seemed like several minutes, and we both assumed that it was probably helicopters from the base with searchlights on." Soon afterwards, her husband received a phone call and told her he had to report to the base. "I just assumed that there had been a plane crash somewhere nearby," she says. "But I couldn't figure why my husband, a sheet-metal man who repaired planes, was called in."
She was even more puzzled when he returned home the 18 hours later, with his uniform wrinkled and damp. "I asked him what had happened to him, why he was so wet, and he told me he'd had to go through the decontamination tank at the base. I asked, 'In your clothes?' and he said, 'They were what I was wearing when I was out there.' He told me, 'Well, I guess you might as well know; it's going to be in the papers. A UFO crashed outside of Roswell.'
"I told him he was crazy. 'No,' he replied, 'I'm not.' I don't remember him being particularly shocked or very emotional about it. In fact, he seemed cool as a cucumber. He just made it clear to me that he wasn't going to talk about it."
The following morning, she says, "I asked him again if it was really true and he said, yes, it was." When she asked what the UFO looked like, he explained that "if you took two saucers and put them together, that's what it looked like." On the top layer, there were oblong-shaped windows all the way around the craft. He had not looked inside. "I asked him if there was anybody on it. He said, 'I can tell you this much: There were three people. One was dead and two were still alive. I can't tell you anything more.'"
It was not until several days later that Sergeant Robbins finally agreed to drive his wife out to the crash site. By then, all debris had been cleared away. "He didn't say much of anything until we got to a place where there was this big burned spot, a perfect circle so black that it was shiny. No normal fire could have made something like that." It looked like the sand had been melted and turned into a sheet of black glass. "This," he said, "is where I was for 18 hours."
"On the drive home," she says, "I asked him what happened to the spaceship, what happened to the people who were on it. He said, 'I can't tell you that; don't ask me any more.'" That was the last time he ever spoke about it, until he retired from the Air Force in 1961. He died of a heart attack in January, 2000.
Following his retirement, the family moved to Saginaw, near Fort Worth, and he worked first for General Dynamics, then LTV, as an aircraft repairman. "It was years later, when our kids were in high school, that our son Ronald was working on some kind of report on unidentified flying objects and asked his father to tell him about what happened back in Roswell. He didn't say much, basically just what he'd told me years earlier," she says.
"But you know how kids are. Ronald kept asking questions, like what the men found at the crash looked like. Finally, Papa [as she called him] got a pencil and drew this pear-shaped head with large black eyes. Their skin, he said, was brown and they had no nose, no mouth. When Ronald asked him what their bodies looked like, all he would say was, 'Son, you don't want to know about that.'"
She says, "[Ronald] wouldn't talk to you about it…Barbara, my daughter, tells me, 'Daddy's dead, don't bring it up.'"
"All I remember," says their daughter, Barbara Wattlington, "was Dad saying he was stationed in Roswell and that a UFO crashed there."
The last time Anne Robbins remembers her husband talking about it was a few years before his death, when they sat in their Saginaw living room one evening, watching a show about Roswell on TV. "I asked him, 'Was it a hoax?' and all he said was, 'It's the truth. It did land.' I asked him, 'Well, if it did, where is it?' He again said he couldn't tell me that."
She says, "I could never figure out why an airplane repairman would be called out in the middle of the night to participate in the investigation of a crashed UFO." Only after filing her husband's death certificate with military officials in Washington, D.C., did she learn that he had intelligence clearance during his time in Roswell. "That UFO they found didn't just fly away, so where is it?" she says. "And what happened to the people on it? I still say the Air Force knows what happened. Someday, I hope, we might find out the truth."
Want to find out what the government really knows about UFOs? Richard Dolan has researched it carefully and has surprising information for you Please CLICK HERE FOR DOLAN'S EXPANDED ARTICLE on the above http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2003-04-03/feature.html/1/index.html .
Then there's that story of UFO's over Iraq recently. Still trying to track those down.
Interesting times to be alive.
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Can you expand upon this?
Von Braun died in 1977. How do you suppose he knew about the War on Terror?
Then there's that story of UFO's over Iraq recently. Still trying to track those down.
I understand some of them had a horrible, bat-like shape.
Interesting times to be alive.
Maybe "Tinfoil Times" would make a good screen name.
At the very least it scores some points for alliteration...
Soon after he retired, he was visiting my folks and someone mentioned a recent UFO story in the news and scoffed at the idea of ETs existing, let alone visiting. My father's cousin lost the twinkle in his eye and got stone, cold serious. He said that he couldn't say much, but that we should not laugh so quickly at the UFO stories.
My father's cousin was a guy who was involved in much political lobbying, both in private business and in his service as a reserve military Officer. I don't know how well he was connected to the UFO stories or to what his point of reference may have been. But he was not of the tinfoil hat crowd nor did he have much time for hair brained conspiracy theories that traveled far about government cover-ups, etc. in that era.
That old guy's instant reaction to the subject of UFOs has me thinking there may be something to it.
You're welcome to steal these. I keep them handy for whenever Quix pops up!
Given that von Braun's been dead and buried for almost 26 years now, maybe you need to rethink this statement...
Then the video recorder was invented. We started seeing on-the-spot film of seemingly any event that occurred anywhere. Except UFO's. Don't believe I've ever seen film of a UFO on the evening news. Kinda strange, huh?
I'm no longer a believer.
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