[Frank Kaufmann kept his silence a lot longer than many other alleged witnesses to the Roswell incident. The first time most people heard of him was in the pages of the book "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell" by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt, published in 1994. Even in that book, most of Kaufmann's testimony was credited to a fictional character called Steve MacKenzie. Kaufmann appeared on a television program about Roswell later that year, where he pointed out a crash site now known to be located on a ranch owned by Hub Corn, 20 miles north of Roswell. In that program, Kaufmann's face was never shown. More recently, he has gone fully public. Some researchers consider his testimony unreliable, but Randle and Schmitt regard him as a key witness. Likewise, forensic artist William Louis McDonald has relied heavily on Kaufmann's testimony to reconstruct a plausible model of the crashed spacecraft, recently marketed by Testors Corporation. If Kaufmann can be believed, his recollections of Roswell may rival in importance those of Colonel Philip Corso.
The following text is excerpted from an Associated Press story dated June 30, 1997.]
ROSWELL, N.M. (AP) -- An 80-year-old man with bushy eyebrows sits in his tidy brick house and talks about the time he saw the aliens.
Frank Kaufmann doesn't seem crazy. He smiles often and is warmly polite, if a bit grumpy about the recent influx of UFO buffs.
"You've got these guys coming out of the woodwork," Kaufmann says. "There's people who said they've been abducted, there's women claiming they've given birth to alien babies. That's just a bunch of crap, see."
Kaufmann has his own story to tell.
Fifty years ago, Kaufmann says, he and several soldiers and other civilians working at the Roswell Army Air Field were dispatched to check on reports of a tumbling fireball that had crashed northwest of town.
They found the site easily -- even in the afternoon sun, he says, the glow was visible from the shoulder of Highway 285.
"We were 200-300 yards from the impact area and it didn't look like a plane, it wasn't anything like a missile," he says. "It was kind of a strange looking craft, kind of a horseshoe, almost a Stealth bomber-type shape.
"When we saw what it was, this strange craft and the bodies, we were just shocked," he says. "We radioed in to have body bags sent out, and they were carted off to the base hospital. The craft itself was loaded on a flatbed with a tarp on it and driven right down Main Street to the base."
He describes five dead aliens.
"One was thrown out, it was up against the arroyo; one was half-in, half-out, and the other three were inside," he says.
They had neither big eyes nor long, stringy fingers, he says, but were "trim, good-looking people."
"They were hairless and had kind of ash-colored skin. They were maybe 5-foot-3 or 5-foot-4," he says.
Kaufmann says he and his colleagues "for security reasons took a monkey oath" the evening after visiting the site: "We saw nothing, we heard nothing, we will say nothing."
For 47 years, Kaufmann kept the vow.
Three years ago, as alleged witnesses began speaking up, Kaufmann told his story to authors Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt. He insisted, at first, that his name not be revealed. These days, after repeating his tale a number of times, Kaufmann is more candid.
"I'm not going to be around much longer," he says. "Folks might as well know."
Original file name: CNI - Kaufman recalls
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