Another Roswell military witness tells his story

Retired Air Force veteran Milton Sprouse clearly remembers the summer day in 1947 when he returned to Roswell Army Air Field aboard the B-29 bomber Dave's Dream from a three-day maneuver in Florida.

Sprouse, then a corporal and engine mechanic in the Army Air Forces, could not believe what his ground crew was telling him: A UFO had crashed in the New Mexico desert, on a ranch 70 miles away.

Milton Sprouse. Photograph taken by John Gastaldo

Sedona.biz reports: according to Sprouse, five of his crew were called to the site to collect the remaining debris and load it onto a flatbed truck. Sprouse was ordered to stay with Dave's Dream in case the military should suddenly need the craft.

Author and ufologist Thomas J. Carey interviewed Sprouse three times with co-author Donald Schmitt. Sprouse is mentioned on page 233 of their new book, "Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-Up."

About 500 soldiers sent to the crash site were lined shoulder to shoulder and ordered to scour the property for debris, he said.

"They lined them up and then said, 'We want you to go through this ranch the way you're facing until we tell you to stop, and we want you to pick up everything unnatural,'" Sprouse said. All this for a weather balloon? (the official explanation of what happened)

"When my crew got back (from the crash site), we talked for weeks," he said. "They told me everything and I believe them. ... They told me, 'Milt, it's true.'"

Among the material discovered was a malleable, foil-like material that could be laid flat with no creases after being squashed into a ball.

A staff sergeant in his barracks was called to the hospital shortly after the crash, he said.

"He and two doctors and two nurses were in the emergency room, and they brought in one of those five humanoid bodies that they had recovered," he said. "They said, 'We want this dissected and we want a complete history of how it functions and the parts and everything.'"

The next day, the man from his barracks was transferred from the base, Sprouse said.

"We never heard from him again," he said. "We asked and (they said), 'Oh, we don't know nothing about it.' ... I heard later that both nurses and both doctors were shipped different directions and nobody ever knew where they went."

Sprouse recalled an interesting conversation with the owner of a funeral home in Roswell several years later.

"We had some friend of ours that died, and he said, 'Hey Milt, I want to talk to you,'" he said. "He says, 'You know the base come to me and wanted five children's caskets.' That was two or three days after the crash. I said, 'No kidding.' He says, 'I only had one, and I told them that.' They said, 'One won't do us very good,' and they went somewhere else and got them."