Roswell NM
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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.
For more information, click here.
