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Witness to Roswell (Carey & Schmitt, 2007) — the pro-crash-retrieval witness compendium

  • Type: media (non-fiction book — pro-ET Roswell investigation)
  • Work: Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-Up by Thomas J. Carey & Donald R. Schmitt (2007; revised & expanded edition). The major modern pro-crash-retrieval Roswell book — built on the authors’ decades of witness interviews.
  • Credibility: ~25 (advocacy compendium) — valuable as the source-of-record for the pro-ET witness corpus (and for the Haut affidavit it published), but weak as evidence: it rests on late, elderly, secondhand, and un-cross-examinable testimony, includes witnesses the authors themselves later impeached, and does not seriously engage the Mogul explanation. See assessment.
  • Full verbatim text: witness-to-roswell-carey-schmitt-full (extracted from the user’s e-book copy, 2026-05-31).

The most thorough assembly of the pro-crash-retrieval witness case, and therefore the best single place to see both its strongest threads and its structural weaknesses. Cite it as the compendium of the claims, not as independent verification.

The thesis

A deliberate 60-year government cover-up of a 1947 extraterrestrial crash: two debris/recovery sites near Corona and north of Roswell; non-human bodies recovered and routed to the base hospital and beyond; a press-diversion cover story (the weather balloon); and decades of witnesses silenced by oaths and intimidation. The book’s capstone is the sealed Haut affidavit (Ch. 25 / Appendix V), presented as a “voice from the grave.”

The witness corpus (what’s actually new here)

The book’s distinctive contribution is its deathbed / sworn-to-secrecy witnesses — mostly base personnel (distinct from the four “saw-the-bodies” claimants), framed around the idea that an oath kept them silent until the end:

  • Maj. Edwin Easley (1947 base provost marshal) — repeatedly told investigator Kevin Randle only that he “couldn’t discuss it; he was still sworn to secrecy,” then near death (1992) confirmed participation to his family and, shown a Roswell book, reacted “Ohhh…the creatures!”
  • Maj. Patrick Saunders (base adjutant) — before dying (1995) wrote on copies of a Roswell book “This is the truth, and I still haven’t told anyone!” and reportedly bragged he had “covered the ‘paper trail’” (Appendix III).
  • Mary Ann Gardner (hospice nurse) — relayed a dying, unnamed female patient’s account of a crashed ship and “little people with large heads and large eyes.”

Credibility assessment

What raises it

  • It assembles the real corpus — the single most complete catalogue of the pro-case testimony; the source-of-record for the Haut affidavit and the Easley/Saunders accounts.
  • Easley is the genuinely strongest case — unlike Haut, he was consistently silent (“sworn to secrecy”) and confirmed only privately near death: the silence-then-confession pattern that actually fits the secrecy model (see 2026-05-31-deathbed-confessions-how-seriously). That deserves real, if limited, weight.
  • Some witnesses are genuine 1947 base personnel, not fabulists who wandered in.

What lowers it

  • The authors impeach their own witnesses. They concede Frank Kaufmann — the key witness of their earlier book — “was a fabricator of documents,” then retroactively reinterpret Saunders’s “this is the truth” note (originally read as endorsing the whole Kaufmann-based book) to mean only one adjacent passage. Post-hoc reinterpretation by invested authors is weak.
  • Secondhand and un-cross-examinable. The decisive accounts reach us only through the authors and the witnesses’ families (Easley’s “creatures,” Gardner’s unnamed patient, the sealed Haut affidavit) — none questionable by an outside party.
  • Committed advocates. Carey & Schmitt are pro-crash-retrieval throughout; the book is built to confirm the cover-up, not to test it.
  • Mogul barely engaged. The book does not seriously contend with the materials-match and the Project Mogul reconstruction that the case turns on.

Net assessment

~25 (advocacy compendium). Witness to Roswell is the best catalogue of the pro-crash-retrieval testimony and the source-of-record for its capstone documents — and it contains the one deathbed case (Easley) that genuinely fits the sworn-to-secrecy model, which keeps it above pure floor-level lore. But as evidence it is weak: late, elderly, secondhand, author-mediated, internally impeached (Kaufmann), and silent on the prosaic explanation. The usable rule: treat the book as the inventory of the claims — cite individual witnesses with their individual reliability (Easley higher, Haut/Saunders mediated, the body-witnesses low) — and weight the corpus as a whole as committed advocacy, not independent corroboration. It documents that a cover story existed (which the principals admitted — see roswell-incident-1947); it does not establish that the secret was extraterrestrial.

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