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From: Greg Sandow <gsandow@prodigy.net>
Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 13:10:56 -0400
Fwd Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 02:53:58 -0400
Subject: Korff on Roswell (2)

Now I'll look at Kal Korff's treatment of Maj. Edwin Easley, the
Provost Marshall at the Roswell air base, a job that put him in
charge of the base's military police.

Before going on, though, I want to restate one ground rule. I'm not
taking a stand here on what really crashed at Roswell, or, for that
matter, on the overall worth of Kal's book. I'm just commenting on
three passages, in which he discusses things I know a little bit
about.

On to Easley. Kal has one piece of new information, the source -- and
thus, the importance -- of which is oddly buried in his footnotes.
This is that Easley "had a tendency to place himself in events at
which he was not present." The source for this, according to the
footnote, is Easley's physician. And while I give Kal full credit for
finding this out, I must fault him for not telling us more. How long
did this doctor treat Easley? How well did he know him? How often did
Easley's memory confabulate in this way? What was the context of his
confabulations? Without this information, there's no way to know
what Korff's new data means. Did Easley imagine he was at family
functions he'd actually missed (a relatively harmless invention), or
did he speak of major trips, let's say, which in reality he'd never
taken (which would be a lot more serious)? I'm sensitive to these
matters partly because my own mother is 91, and has been losing her
memory for the past two years. Right now I wouldn't trust her
recollections even of things you'd think would be engraved in her
brain cells, like the birth of her two children. But a year ago this
wasn't so. Kal hasn't told us enough about Easley to let me know what
to make of the new data.

Moving on now to Easley's alleged role at Roswell, Kal writes the
following:

"Kevin Randle interviewed Maj. Edwin Easley shortly before his death.
After initially refusing to confirm to Randle that he was even there
at Roswell, Randle claims that Easley on his deathbed envetually
confessed that not only had he 'been there,' but that he had also
seen alien bodies. Indeed, the authors write, 'Easley was reluctant
to talk of bodies, but finally, before he died, said that he had seen
them. He had been close enough to them to know they weren't human. He
called them "creatures."'" [For punctuation fans -- after 17 years of
professional writing, I think this is the first time I've ever had to
use three levels of quotation marks!]

Kal then says, in much the spirit of his remarks on Pappy Henderson
(see my previous message, "Korff on Roswell (1)"), that Randle wasn't
present when Easley died, and that thus we have nothing but "Kevin
Randle's 'word'" for what Easley said. "Until Kevin Randle is ever
able to provide evidence and/or documentation to back up his
statement," Kal concludes, "Easley's alleged deathbedremarks cannot
be considered as credible evidence for the extraterrestrial nature of
the Roswell incident."

Kal, however, is not accurate in stating what really happened between
Easley and Randle, or where Randle got his information. This perhaps
isn't entirely his fault, because the sequence of events isn't
completely clear in Randle's books, either; you have to dig in
footnotes and appendices to fully comprehend it, and even then I'm
not sure that everything is completely understandable until you look
at Evin's files. Still, Kal should have checked and/or written more
carefully, and not allowed himself to print such an inaccurate --
and, I'm afraid -- misleading summary of what Easley really said.

Here's the true story. Kevin (as you won't understand from reading
Kal's summary) interviewed Easley three times by phone. In the last
of those conversations, Easley -- by no means on his deathbed -- told
Kevin that the crash had involved an extraterrestrial craft. Later,
when he was very sick and close to death, he murmured something about
"the creatures," in a context that made it clear he was talking about
Roswell. Admittedly, Kevin wasn't there, but --as Kal again doesn't
tell us -- he has a reasonable source for the information. Kal
wouldn't have known this from either of Kevin's books; I only know it
because I found the document in Kevin's files. It's a letter from (if
my memory is reliable here) a Dallas physician who knows Easley's
daughter. Supposedly Easley's daughter showed her dad a copy of the
first Randle/Scmitt Roswell book, with a comment something like "Dad,
you're in this." Easley, very sick and soon to die, replied simply by
saying "The creatures..." which I grant sounds like something out of
a bad horror movie.

But on the other hand the event may well have happened. The logical
next step for Kevin would have been to call Easley's duaghter to
confirm this. I don't know whether or not he did; he's guilty of
sloppy work if he didn't, since as unchecked third-hand information,
the letter from the man in Dallas isn't conclusive evidence by
itself. Still, Kal was far too hasty here. If the source of Kevin's
information wasn't clear to him, he should have picked up the phone
and asked Kevin about it. (I'm not getting into the dispute between
Kal and Kevin about what Roswell material was or wasn't available
through CUFOS. If Kal couldn't get what he wanted through CUFOS, a
call to Kevin was the logical, in fact inevitable next step. Had I
been writing this story for a newspaper or a national magazine, no
editor I've ever worked for would have let me publish until I'd made
that call.)

More serious, though, is Kal's failure to distinguish between this
alleged deathbed conversation, which Kevin didn't hear first-hand,
and Easley's alleged admission on the phone that the crash was
extraterrestrial, which was supposedly made right in Kevin's ear. Kal
also doesn't mention that Kevin talked to Easley three times on the
phone, and, maybe most crucially of all, he leaves out one of the
most central parts of the Easlsey/Randle saga, which is Easley's talk
about being sworn to secrecy.

Kal alludes to it, indirectly, when he says that Easlsey initially
refused to confirm "that he was even there at Roswell." This
statement, on its face, is not even correct, since Easley did state
with no hesitation that he was at the base. Of course, Kal is simply
using language freely here, and really means that Easley refused to
confirm that he was involved in any crash activities. But even then
Kal's sentence is misleading, because it leaves out the very crucial
why and how of Easley's refusal.

Here's the transcript of the start of Kevin's first talk with Easley:
I regret that I didn't copy out the very start of the call, where
Kevin introduces himself, and establishes that Easley was stationed
at the Roswell base. From that point, however -- and I've omitted
very little -- the conversation proceeds like this:

KR: And I understand that you were the provost marshall at one time.
EE: That's right.
KR: At the 509th. During July of 1947?
EE: Yes.
KR: You're aware of the incident that took place there in July of
'47? The alleged crash of a flying saucer?
EE: [Pause] I've heard about it.
KR: Do you have any first-hand knowlege of it?
EE: About what?
KR: Do you have any first-hand knowlege of the incident?
EE: I can't talk about it.
KR: Then you do have some first-hand knowlege?
EE: I can't talk about it.
KR: [Pause] Uh-huh. [Laughs nervously]
EE: Uh-huh.
KR: Well, we have, we have received information from a couple of
    people that, that you had been out at the crash site yourself
    as provost marshall. So that was what we were trying to confirm.
    But you can't talk about it, right?
EE: Yes.
KR: Is there anything at all you might be able to tell me that would
    help me in my search.
EE: Help you what?
KR: Help me learn exactly what happened there in 1947.
EE: Well, you should start with, well, the former commander was
    Colonel Blanchard, but I think he passed away.
KR: Yes, he died from a heart attack at the Pentagon.
EE: Uh-huh.
KR: And I've talked to Col. Birley, who was the operations officer,
    and Patrick Saunders, who was the adjutant. And we've been in
    contact with --
EE: Have you talked to the intelligence officer?
KR: Major Marcel has talked, told others what happened. We have some
    taped interviews with him, talking about what he had seen the days
    he was there. And we've talked to some of the other fellows who were
    involved in the counterintelligence end of it.
EE: Well, I think they can tell you everything you need to know.
KR: Uh-huh. Can you tell me if you were at the crash site?
EE: I can't talk about it, I told you that.
KR: Yes sir, I understand.
EE: I've been sworn to secrecy, I can't tell you that.

    ****

But this wasn't the end of the conversation. Easley stayed on the
phone with Randle for quite a while, offering more leads. And he took
Randle's calls twice afterward. It's hard -- especially when you hear
the tape, and can weigh Easley's tone, and, especially, take the
measure of his silences -- not to form the impression that Easley
really did know something important, or thought he did, and that he
wanted, if not to talk about it, then at least to help Kevin find out
everything he could. Why else would Easley offer name after name for
Kevin to contact, as he did in the portion of the talk I haven't
transcribed? This, I'd think, is greatly significant, even if what
crashed was only a Mogul balloon. Easley's testimony helps establish
that whatever happened was serious enough for the Air Force to cover
up.

Kal doesn't breathe a word of this, and hence has misrepresented both
the tone and content of Kevin's interviews with Easley. Kevin, I
have to say, made one serious mistake. He didn't tape the
conversation during which, he says, Easley finally told his story,
and stated that what crashed was alien. (Or, to be absolutely
accurate, said that Kevin would be correct to believe such a thing.)
So here we really do have only Kevin's "word" to rely on, along with
his notes, of course, though when Kevin states (as he did in a
previous message here) that his notes ought to be sufficient
evidence, I can't agree. Though I trust Kevin's honesty, in something
as earth-shaking as this I want a tape.

Here was something Kal really could have nailed Kevin for. But he
missed it -- and, as I've shown, garbled the Easley story, as well as
making the elementary journalistic mistake of failing to call a
source to supply missing information.

Greg Sandow

(It may take me a few days to get to part three of my comments, which
will be about General Exon. But maybe that will give Kal time to
respond.)