Tom Carey

Ikwipedia

Tom Carey

Tom Carey is an American UFO researcher and author specializing in the 1947 Roswell incident. Working closely with co-author Donald Schmitt, he has conducted field investigations in New Mexico since 1998 and has interviewed approximately 600 first- and second-hand witnesses to the incident. He has co-authored seven books on Roswell and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and has appeared on Larry King Live, Coast to Coast AM, and other media.

Background

Carey holds a background in anthropology and archaeology, disciplines he applied directly to his UFO investigations. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he first became interested in the Roswell case after reading The Roswell Incident (1980) by William Moore and Charles Berlitz. He joined the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago, founded by J. Allen Hynek, and served on its board of directors. He also served as a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

In 1991, while at CUFOS, Carey read articles by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt in the International UFO Reporter announcing their effort to reopen the Roswell case, which had lain largely dormant since the first book appeared in 1980. Carey contacted Randle and volunteered to investigate the alleged archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania who had reportedly witnessed the crash site, tracing one — John Carter — to the University's archaeology program and determining that Carter had been present at the site but lied when interviewed directly. Randle and Schmitt parted ways in 1995. In May 1998, Carey partnered with Schmitt on a field trip to New Mexico, beginning a collaboration that continued for more than twenty-seven years.

Roswell research

Witness interviews

Carey and Schmitt built a database of approximately 600 first- and second-hand witnesses to the Roswell incident, including military personnel, ranchers, and civilians. Carey described the witness pool as nearly exhausted by the time of the podcast, noting that a person who was twenty years old in 1947 would be ninety-two at the time of recording. He characterized the investigation as assembling a jigsaw puzzle from hundreds of partial testimonies: "Everyone only knew their own little snippet of what they knew about the case. It's been our task to put those like a jigsaw puzzle, to put those little snippets together into a timeline jigsaw puzzle."

Among local witnesses he interviewed was Tom Brookshire, a former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back who was originally from Roswell, New Mexico; Brookshire provided approximately two hours of telephone testimony but died of gallbladder cancer before Carey could conduct a planned video interview.

Archaeological digs

Carey participated in multiple field excavations at the alleged debris field on the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico. The largest, in 2002, was sponsored by the Sci Fi Channel and supervised by the University of New Mexico's Office of Contract Archaeology under a credentialed archaeologist. No pieces of wreckage were recovered, but the team believed they identified one of the ground gouges left by the craft skipping across the desert floor, confirmed in cross-section by backhoe trench as an aeolian deposit. The crash site is on private property surrounded by Bureau of Land Management federal land; Carey and Schmitt maintained standing permission from the property owner.

Books

Carey co-authored the following works with Donald Schmitt:

Key claims

Three crash sites

Carey and Schmitt concluded that the Roswell event involved three distinct sites. The first was the debris field on the Foster Ranch, where the craft allegedly broke apart — struck by lightning during the New Mexico monsoon season on the night of July 2, 1947 — scattering thin metallic fragments across a wide area. The second site, two and a half miles east of the debris field on a low bluff, is designated the "Dee Proctor body site," where Carey and Schmitt believe two occupants were thrown clear of the explosion. The third site — the "final impact site" — is where the inner cabin or escape capsule of the craft came to rest some thirty to thirty-five miles further, much closer to Roswell, with the remaining occupants including one reported still alive and walking by a civilian witness.

Retrieval and storage

According to Carey, all recovered wreckage and bodies were transported to Roswell Army Air Field (later Walker Air Force Base), specifically to Hangar P (now Building 84), before onward transfer. Some material stopped at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas for inspection by the 8th Air Force command before the bulk was transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which he describes as the primary repository prior to Area 51. Carey's description of Wright-Patterson as the destination is independently corroborated by Colonel Philip Corso, who described personally encountering one of the Roswell bodies while serving as post duty officer at Fort Riley, Kansas: "There was five crates there... I lifted one up and here's this body there and floating and fluid... five trucks coming through here from an airfield in New Mexico and they're heading for Wright Patterson Air Force." Carey asserts that in the early 1980s the material was moved from Wright-Patterson to Area 51 in Nevada, and that following a 1996 lawsuit against that facility, it was relocated again — the bodies to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and the physical wreckage to private contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Battelle Memorial Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the RAND Corporation.

Memory metal and back-engineering

Carey claims the wreckage included thin, indestructible sheets of shape-memory alloy that could be wadded into a ball, released, and would return to their original shape. He argues that Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, attempted to reverse-engineer this material but laundered the results through the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which announced the development of Nitinol (nickel-titanium alloy) in 1962. Corso's own account corroborates this reverse-engineering narrative: he stated that General Arthur Trudeau told him the process of fully developing the transistor from extraterrestrial materials took five years, and that without "the help... from outer space," the development would have taken 250 years.

Cover-up

Carey describes a three-tier containment strategy applied after the crash. The national press was handled through a rapid public retraction: on July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release announcing recovery of a "flying saucer"; the story was retracted the following day with the official explanation that it was a weather balloon, after which "the press dropped the story cold turkey." Military officers were contained through appeals to national security; enlisted personnel were required to sign non-disclosure agreements and threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth. Civilian ranchers who reached the site first were, according to Carey's witnesses, threatened with their lives.

Carey also recounts that rancher Mac Brazel was detained at Roswell Army Airfield and pressured to recant his original account; he was threatened with commitment to a psychiatric institution if he did not cooperate. Despite this, Carey notes that Brazel's subsequently published statement in the Roswell Daily Record ended with a veiled repudiation: "I know one thing — whatever I found was no high altitude weather device."

On the 1994 and 1997 Air Force reports, Carey is dismissive: the Project Mogul balloon explanation he calls "ridiculous on so many levels," and the 1997 Roswell Report: Case Closed explanation — that witnesses had confused crash-test dummies used in the High Dive parachute tests of the 1950s with alien bodies due to "time compression" — was, he says, "laughed off the stage" at the Air Force's own press conference.

Wright-Patterson and Senator Goldwater

Carey's book on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base focuses on what he terms "the real Area 51" — the base where he claims all captured alien technology and bodies were centrally studied before Area 51 in Nevada was established, including a classified storage area known as Hangar 18 and its associated "Blue Room." He recounts how Senator Barry Goldwater — a reserve Air Force Major General and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee — attempted in 1963 to enter the Blue Room and was refused by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, who "cursed him up one side and down the other" and threatened court-martial.

Testimony on the cover-up machinery

On the mechanisms used to suppress the Roswell event, Carey described three tiers used in sequence: the press was neutralized by a two-day retraction cycle that turned the story from "flying saucer" to "weather balloon" so swiftly that journalists dropped it; the officer corps was controlled through appeals to national security; and the enlisted men "were all herded together in the various units and threatened with prison in Leavenworth if they didn't keep silent about it — they all had to sign non-disclosure agreements." For ranchers who reached the crash site before the military, more direct methods were used: "They were threatened with their lives. They weren't threatened with prison." Rancher Mac Brazel was specifically threatened with commitment to a psychiatric institution if he did not recant his account, and a local radio announcer was actually institutionalized in Texas. Nevertheless, Brazel's published statement in the Roswell Daily Record ended with a veiled repudiation he could not be prevented from including: "I know one thing — whatever I found was no high altitude weather device."

Carey also described receiving testimony from a woman who in 1952 took dictation from Wernher von Braun at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, during which von Braun stated he was personally aware of three UFO crash cases up to that year — of which she recalled only Roswell by name. For Carey, this represents confirmation that the leading figures of the U.S. post-war aerospace establishment received briefings directly on crash-recovered material.

See also

References