Lydia Sleppy
| Name(s): | Lydia Sleepy |
|---|---|
| Incident: | [[The Roswell UFO Incident Main Page]] |
[In the sections of this document that contain testimony, all text not enclosed in brackets, like those that enclose this sentence, is verbatim testimony.]
[Lydia Sleppy was a teletype operator at Roswell radio station KSWS. The event she describes below took place around 4:00 pm on July 7, 1947. She was interviewed in October 1990 by Stanton Friedman.]
We were Mutual Broadcasting and ABC, and if we had anything newsworthy, we would put it on the [teletype] machine, and I was the one who did the typing. It was in my office. Mr Tucker [Merle Tucker was the station owner] was in Washington DC trying to get an application approved for a station in El Paso, when this call came from John McBoyle [another KSWS staffer]. He told me he had something hot for the network. I said, "Give me a minute and I'll get the assistant manager," because if it was anything like that, I wanted one of them there while I was taking it down.
I went back and asked Mr [Karl] Lambertz (he came up from the big Dallas station) if he would come up and watch. John was dictating and [Karl] was standing right at my shoulder. I got into it enough to know that it was a pretty big story, when the bell came on [signaling an interruption]. Typing came across: "This is the FBI, you will cease transmitting."
I had my shorthand pad, and I turned around and told [Karl] that I had been cut off, but that I could take it in shorthand and then we could call it in to the network. I took it in shorthand, as John went on to give the story. He had seen them take the thing away. He'd been out there [presumably at the Foster ranch] when they took it away. And at that time, if I remember correctly, John said they were gonna load it up and take it to Texas. But when the planes came in, they were from Wright Field.
