Bill Rickett

Bill Rickett

[NB: In the sections of this document that contain testimony, all text not enclosed in brackets, like those that enclose this sentence, is verbatim testimony.]

[Bill Rickett was a Counter Intelligence Corps officer based in Roswell. He had an opportunity to examine some of the wreckage recovered from the Foster Ranch. He escorted Dr Lincoln LaPaz, a meteor expert from the New Mexico Institute of Meteoritics, on a tour of the crash site and the surrounding area.]

[The material] was very strong and very light. You could bend it but couldn't crease it. As far as I know, no one ever figured out what it was made of....

It was LaPaz's job to try to find out what the speed and trajectory of the thing was. LaPaz was a world-renowned expert on trajectories of objects in the sky, especially meteors, and I was told to give him all the help I could.

At one point LaPaz interviewed the farmer Mac Brazel. I remember something coming up during their conversation about this fellow thinking that some of his animals had acted strangely after this thing happened. Dr LaPaz seemed very interested in this for some reason.

LaPaz wanted to fly over the area, and this was arranged. He found one other spot where he felt this thing had touched down and then taken off again. The sand at this spot had been turned into a glass-like substance. We collected a boxful of samples of this material. As I recall, there were some metal samples here, too, of that same sort of thin foil stuff. LaPaz sent this box off somewhere for study; I don't know or recall where, but I never saw it again. This place was some miles from the other one.

LaPaz was very good at talking to people, especially some of the local ranch hands who didn't speak a lot of English. LaPaz spoke Spanish. I remember he found a couple of people who had seen two -- I don't know what to call them, UFOs I suppose -- anyway, had seen two of these things fly over very slowly at a very low altitude on a date, in the evening, that he determined had been a day or two after the other one had blown up. These people said something about animals being affected, too....

Before he went back to Albuquerque, he told me that he was certain that this thing had gotten into trouble, that it had touched down for repairs, taken off again, and then exploded. He also felt certain there were more than one of these devices, and that the others had been looking for it. At least that's what he said. He was positive the thing had malfunctioned.

The Air Force's explanation that it was a balloon was totally untrue. It was not a balloon. I never did know for sure what its purpose was, but it wasn't ours. I remember speculating with LaPaz that it might have been some higher civilization checking on us. LaPaz wasn't against the idea, but he was going to leave speculations out of his report.

{{Category: Military]]