LR: What he's eluding to is a lot of continuous disinformation out there. There are some liars out there now. But if you take the original people who were interviewed then, I don't think any of them are lying.
CC: Do you think it's extraterrestrial?
CR: Something definitely crashed. There's no doubt about that. There is a little bit for everybody in this story.
KY: After seeing the 'big picture,' what was it that brought you the idea for a book?
CR: We had a lot of strange things happen to us, things that were somewhat unexplainable. Those strange things seemed to be leading us.
LR: I guess we could tell them a few things, Curt. We could tell them what we saw riding up the road that one day when you stopped the jeep, couldn't we?
CR: We saw some evidence, but we're not going to tell you what it was.
LR: We were driving up the side of a mountain. Understand that this part of New Mexico is totally flat except for about two spots, one of them is a mountain range around Albuquerque. In the southern part of the state there is one bump, and you can see that for miles, it is Capitan Mountain, the Ragsdale crash site. After talking with Shiela that morning, we were impressed that we had finally seen the crash site.
CR: We thought we were in a position where we could now zero in, but we wanted to give the Ragsdale site one last look.
LR: We wanted to take some measurements -- prove to ourselves that Ragsdale must have seen something else, the crash couldn't have happened there.
CR: We had gone through a whole series of mathematical computations. We were trying to explain this from a scientific standpoint, trying to determine how an event could occur at the Ragsdale site and so forth. Right now, we're beginning to think that there may not be much merit to the Ragsdale site - at least from the standpoint of the UFO crash.
LR: The reason we had discredited the site was because everything we had read about it was negative.
CR: So there we were, 53 miles from nowhere. I mean NOWHERE, and we're driving along on this road and get to Capitan Mountain and here's this great big motor home in front of us heading the same direction. A coyote ran across the road trying to get away from the motor home, and at that point, we thought about writing a book.
LR: So we're way out there in this 4-wheel drive jeep going up the side of this mountain on a two-track dirt road hoping we don't meet someone coming along in the opposite direction. Then, all of a sudden, Curt slams on the brakes. It's straight down one way and straight up the other way, nothing but scrubby brush everywhere you look. So he throws the door open, gets out and starts up through the brush. I'm sitting there in the passenger's seat wondering what did I miss?
CR: It was colder than hell, too.
LR: And I'm sitting in the passenger seat wondering what I missed. Curt doesn't want me to tell you what he saw...
CR: But we found something.
LR: He starts hollering at me, so finally I get out and start looking for him. I finally found him, and it really was pretty amazing. It's a kind of a coincidental thing, but we were looking at each other and saying this is really bizarre.
CC: Did you actually see something?
LR: We brought it back.
CC: But how did you know to find it there?
CR: I was just driving along, stopped and I looked. Jumped out of the vehicle, left the door open. It's just one of those mysterious things.
LR: Something just caught his eye.
CR: Honest to goodness. I just felt like I had to get out of the vehicle and there it was. It was about 50-feet from the road.
LR: When you think about the scrubby pinion pines and brush and all that kind of stuff. To be honest with you, if I were standing there and somebody had said that there was something really bizarre within 20 feet of me, I would have never seen it. You would just have to look at it in the right way, and (LR slaps his forehead) it all comes to you.
CR: It was a sign, that's what it was. It was a sign, so we continued on up the mountain.
LR: Remember now, we were there to discredit this place.
KY: What time of the day was this?
CR: It was more towards the evening.
LR: I'd say when that happened it was more towards 2 O'clock in the afternoon.
KY: So you retrieved a physical artifact?
CR: Something.
KY: Was this something man-made?
CR: Yes.
KY: If I poked at you for details, would you be responsive?
CR: We wouldn't tell you. Not right now.
LR: It's material
to this whole thing. It definitely fits. I will tell you what some of the
other artifacts that we brought back were.
CC: Did you know when you saw this artifact, though, that it would have some impact on what we have been fed and told all along?
LR: Yes, it definitely fits. There's so much that happened this one day that by the end of the day I was sitting in a restaurant shaking.
CR: He was shaking. He was absolutely shaken. He was so scared, but I wanted to go back, because while we up there, we found something REALLY bizarre. We're not going to tell you what that was. We found something MUCH more bizarre, and I wanted to go back that night, but Larry said: There's no way you're going to get me to go back there.
LR: This all happened in one day, the deal with the red Jeep, the Corn interview and the trip to the Ragsdale site. I would think it's a bit humorous at this point.
CC: What exact day did you make this historical discovery?
LR: It would be in mid-October of '96. I don't recall the exact date but we'll get it for you.
CR: Actually it would be more towards the end. It would have been possibly the 24th or 25th of October.
LR: So the weirdness went on. We go on up to the rock, and you have to understand that the way you recognize the Ragsdale site is by this unique rock there with a crack through it. We spent about an hour at this one site picking up stuff and throwing it in the back of our jeep. We then go on up the side of a mountain and try to remember where this rock is. The first time, we had a countour map that showed us where this rock was and it still took us an hour to find it. You have to be looking right at it to see it.
CR: We're talking about the side of a mountain with this countour map and we kept going in and out trying to find it for over an hour, so it was remarkable that we found the rock. Most people don't find it.
KY: Did you photograph this location while on the site with the artifacts that you discovered?
LR: Yeah, but we're not going to show you. We have pictures of all the artifacts, this will be included in the book.
CR: We're not going to tell you the whole story today.
LR: So we go on back up to the site, and we're still fumbling around although we've already been there once looking for it. We finally find it and we use the rock as our centerpoint. I had a notepad with me and Curt had a notebook with him. We sit on the rock and discuss what we're going to do there -- about taking some measurements, compass bearings, or whatever. Suddenly, we hear this noise. There is a rustling sound coming from the brush. At first, we thought it must have been a BIG animal.
CR: You can't see real well in there, because of the brushy growth.
LR: Then out of nowhere here comes this guy -- hiking real fast...
CR: Almost jogging...
LR: ...and approaches right up to us, holding a Jim Ragsdale book like the one we had purchased on our first visit to the museum. He says:"Aha, so zis must be ze place! I zee vee zeek ze zame zing!"
CR: Can you believe this? Now this guy has this book open, a Jim Ragsdale book, and he's running. He comes running up through the trees and we're standing there looking at him.
LR: Remember, we told you that this place is hard to find, so this guy, we assume, must have been looking for it for quite a while. He comes up to it, takes a peek at it, and (LR snaps his finger) out of there he goes.
CC: That quick?
CR: Yeah.
CC: Did he come from Germany?
LR: Yes, he was German.
KY: Did he see what you saw?
LR: He has the book in his hand. He sees the crack in the rock.
KY: Did he see what you saw?
LR: He has the book in his hand. He sees the crack in the rock.
CR: Here this guy drives a minumum of 50-miles from Roswell on this 4-wheel-drive road and suddenly leaves after 5-minutes. He disappears. He didn't even stay.
LR: Here's another part of the story. So we went on and spent a couple of hours up there, and at the end of our day, we find him still parked down there in a white Buick. Why would he come all the way out there, 53-miles, walk through all this brush to find this rock, look at it for a few seconds, and then go back and sit in his car for two hours?
CR: It's very weird.
LR: So at that point in time, we worked away from the rock. Based upon what we've read concerning Ragsdale, we were thinking that most likely this is not the real site. But, we wanted to prove it for ourselves. Curt is thinking that if anything really did happen at this site in 1947, knowing how hard it would be to get it all cleaned up, any evidence would not be found way up at the site - it was just too high up. The event occurred 50-years ago. Whatever was left behind would be washed down the side of the mountain by now. So, we decided that our best chance of finding stuff would be to start working our way down the mountain, examining the stream beds and kicking rocks over to see what, if anything, might be wedged between or under the rocks. So we work our way down a little bit. We use our hands to check under these things. It looks like a moonscape up there -- many huge boulders. We get our hands down into the loose soil and leaves and pine needles to see if there was anything down in there. Suddenly there is something. What is that?
We come out with a crumpled up mess of... well, something or another, and we're knocking the leaves and sediment off of it. There is some small printing on it -- and what do you suppose it is? It was a very old decayed C-ration wrapper. There were several of them, actually.
KY: What do you believe is the significance of finding C-ration wrappers at this location?
CR: It told us that somebody had used military C-rations there. We thought it quite interesting that we found it there. We found some of them at locations up near the rock, too.
LR: So, picture this. I'm standing there scratching my head over this find. I head back to the rock to get my note pad and start taking some notes.
CR: Now, understand that this is the Ragsdale crash site, the site that the larger UFO Museum claims to be the site of the crash. When Larry and I were there, we were finding evidence of C-rations and other things at this site. We were asking each other why we are finding this stuff here?
LR: Why hadn't the museum people been out here to look around? To us, it looked as if we were two of only a very few people who had found the place.
CR: They didn't bother to go out and look.
LR: If they were so proud of this site, you'd think they would've had all this stuff hanging on their wall. This stuff points directly to some possibility of a military encampment or operation here many years ago.