{"it":{"id":"CR-KIN1953","name":"Kingman crash (single witness)","kind":"crash","sub":"Alleged crash site","place":"Near Kingman, Arizona, USA (approximate)","lat":35.19,"lon":-114.05,"date":"1953-05-21 (alleged)","rep":"His affidavit says the object was about 30 ft across, sunk 20 inches into sand, with one dead occupant about 4 ft tall.","off":"No official record or second witness exists.","src":[{"t":"Explore Kingman blog (Werner affidavit text)","u":"https://www.explorekingman.com/blog-1953-kingman-ufo-crash/"},{"t":"Kevin Randle, Kingman report, hosted by NICAP","u":"https://www.nicap.org/reports/kingman530521_randle.htm"}],"tags":["Crash sites"],"sum":"Thin evidence, labelled: the whole case rests on one man. Arthur Stansel, who worked at the nuclear test site in Nevada, told the investigator Raymond Fowler under the name 'Fritz Werner' that on 21 May 1953 he was flown from Indian Springs to Phoenix, taken by bus to the desert near Kingman, Arizona, and asked to examine a crashed craft. He said it was oval, like two deep saucers, about thirty feet across, and that a four-foot body in a silvery metallic suit lay in a guarded tent. He signed an affidavit on 7 June 1973.\n\nFowler checked what he could. Werner produced a page from his daily calendar dated May 20 and 21 to support the date.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is why an engineer with a solid career would put his name, even privately, to such a story.\n\nThe researcher Kevin Randle, who has the signed affidavit, sets out the problems. In a first interview with two young men in 1971, Werner described a twelve-foot teardrop; confronted by Fowler, he said he had lied to them. Max Futch, once a temporary chief of Blue Book, did not remember him as a consultant. William Moore reported that the boss Werner named said he knew nothing of it. In 2024 the Pentagon's AARO wrote that no inquiry since 1945 has produced verifiable evidence of any recovered craft.\n\nThe open question is how a single witness's story, with no physical trace, could ever be confirmed or ruled out.","nsrc":2,"new":1,"qs":["One man swore an affidavit describing a 30-foot craft and a 4-foot occupant, and nothing else backs it. How much weight should a lone oath carry?","Crash-retrieval claims keep coming from single witnesses decades later. Is that a sign of cover-up, or of how legends grow?","If even one crash-retrieval story is true, governments have held recovered craft since the 1950s. What would that mean for everything else we've been told?"],"yt":"Compare his tellings.","rel":["CR-ROS"],"hook":"Thin evidence, labelled: one man swore he saw a crashed disc near Kingman in May 1953.","ss":1,"why":"One of the best-known crash stories after Roswell, and a clear case of how far a single witness can carry a claim."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"CR-KIN1953","qs":["Werner told two very different versions of the craft. Does that end the case, or can memory explain it?","A desk calendar note mentions a secret job but no saucer. What would count as real corroboration?","Why do single-witness crash stories keep their hold on people?"],"gal":[],"ms":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Explore Kingman blog (Werner affidavit text)","u":"https://www.explorekingman.com/blog-1953-kingman-ufo-crash/"},{"t":"Kevin Randle, Kingman report, hosted by NICAP","u":"https://www.nicap.org/reports/kingman530521_randle.htm"},{"id":"VCR-KIN1953-3","t":"Explore Kingman: the Kingman UFO crash of 1953 (local tourism page)","u":"https://www.explorekingman.com/blog/kingman-ufo-crash-of-1953"},{"id":"VCR-KIN1953-4","t":"AARO, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Vol. 1 (Mar 2024)","u":"https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF"}],"pts":[{"p":"\"Fritz Werner\" (Arthur Stansel) affidavit of 7 Jun 1973 describes a 30 ft oval craft.","g":"VERIFIED","b":"V","t":"Explore Kingman blog (Werner affidavit text)","u":"https://www.explorekingman.com/blog-1953-kingman-ufo-crash/"},{"p":"He describes a dead occupant about 4 ft tall.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Explore Kingman blog (Werner affidavit text)","u":"https://www.explorekingman.com/blog-1953-kingman-ufo-crash/"},{"p":"Randle notes changing details between tellings.","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","b":"S","t":"Kevin Randle, Kingman report, hosted by NICAP","u":"https://www.nicap.org/reports/kingman530521_randle.htm"}],"sum":"\"May 20. Well, pen's out of ink.\" The entry in the desk calendar goes on in the plain voice of a working engineer: most of the day spent on Frenchman Flat, surveying and supervising the welding of a bridge sensor that had cracked after the last shot. A beer in the evening. Some reading. Then: \"Got funny call from Dr. Doll at 1000. I'm to go on a special job tomorrow.\" The next day's page ends: \"Got picked up at Indian Springs AFB at 4:30 P.M. for a job I can't write or talk about.\"\n\nThis page is labelled thin evidence, because the whole case rests on the man who wrote those lines. His name was Arthur Stansel. In 1953 he was an engineer on special assignment to the Atomic Energy Commission at the atomic proving ground in Nevada, where the United States was testing nuclear weapons. Twenty years later he told the investigator Raymond Fowler that the job he could not write about was a crashed flying saucer in the Arizona desert, near the town of Kingman. Fowler gave him a pseudonym, Fritz Werner, to protect his identity, and that is the name under which the story became one of the best-known crash cases after Roswell.\n\nOn paper, Werner was a witness most investigators can only dream of. He held degrees in mathematics and physics and a master's degree in engineering. According to the Kingman tourism office's account of Fowler's research, he had held engineering posts at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio from 1949 to 1960, working on engine test cells, aircraft landing gear and the effects of blasts on buildings. Three friends Fowler contacted said he was a good engineer and a trusted friend who never lied or exaggerated.\n\nHis story, as he told it to Fowler, went like this. On 21 May 1953 he was flown from Indian Springs Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas, to Phoenix, along with about fifteen other specialists who had been told to hand their valuables, even their watches, to the military police. In Phoenix they boarded a bus with blacked-out windows and were warned not to talk to each other. A full colonel told them that a super-secret Air Force vehicle had crashed and that each of them was to examine it strictly within his own speciality. They drove for about four hours, north-west, he thought, toward Kingman. Night had fallen when the bus stopped and the men climbed out, one at a time, as their names were called.\n\nTwo spotlights blazed on the object, so bright the surrounding desert vanished. It was oval, Werner said, \"like two deep saucers, one inverted upon the other,\" about thirty feet across, made of a dull metal like brushed aluminium, darker around the rim. It had no landing gear. It had struck the desert hard enough to sink, by his affidavit, \"twenty inches into the sand without any sign of structural damage\": no dents, no marks, not even scratches. A curved hatch, about three and a half feet high and a foot and a half wide, hung open. His task was to work out how fast the craft had been travelling when it hit, from the angle and depth of the trench and the compression of the sand. He estimated it weighed about five tons and had struck at about twelve hundred miles an hour.\n\nNearby stood a tent with an armed guard. Werner said he glanced inside and saw the dead body of a humanlike being about four feet tall, with dark brown skin, two eyes, two nostrils, two ears and a small round mouth, dressed in a silvery metallic suit and a skullcap of the same material. On the way back to the bus he managed a few words with another man, who said he had looked inside the craft and seen two swivel seats, an oval cabin, and instruments and displays. A guard noticed them talking and separated them. Each specialist was debriefed alone on a tape recorder. On the bus, the colonel had them raise their right hands and swear an oath of secrecy. Werner signed a sworn affidavit of all this, witnessed by Fowler, on 7 June 1973.\n\nFowler, to his credit, checked everything he could, and that is where the story began to fray. Werner had in fact been interviewed before, on 3 February 1971, by two young men with an interest in UFOs, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. Then he had described something quite different: an object twelve feet long and five feet high, \"more like a teardrop-shaped cigar,\" crashed about twenty-five miles from Phoenix, with a team of about forty. He had told them, too, that he later made contact with beings from the saucers. When Fowler confronted him with the transcript, Werner first said he had been describing a different object he had seen over Thule, in Greenland. Then, in Fowler's words, he \"backed down and admitted that he had lied to the boys.\" Fowler called it \"the most significant and damaging contradiction.\" At a meeting on 25 May 1973, Werner explained that he had drunk four martinis before that interview, and that when he drank he exaggerated. Young told Fowler he had drunk one beer.\n\nThe other checks went no better. Dewey Fournet, a former Pentagon monitor for Project Blue Book, the Air Force's UFO investigation, did not know Werner's name, though he admitted he had not known every consultant. Max Futch, once a temporary chief of Blue Book, thought he had known them all and did not remember Werner among them. The researcher William Moore found Dr. Ed Doll, the boss named in the calendar, in four days, and met him on 9 October 1981. Doll said he knew nothing about any incident near Kingman. No newspaper in Kingman, or in Las Vegas, reported anything. In 2024 the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office wrote that no inquiry since 1945 had produced verifiable evidence of any recovered craft.\n\nThere is an old lesson about testimony here: a man's credibility is spent the moment he admits to embroidering a story for a better audience. The calendar is specific, but it says only that he went on a secret job, which at a nuclear test site in 1953 could have meant almost anything.\n\nAnd yet the researcher Kevin Randle, who later obtained the signed affidavit and Werner's professional resume, did not close the file. He gathered three further accounts, all second-hand. A Cincinnati researcher said a \"Major Daly\" had told his father of being flown, blindfolded, to a hot, sandy place in 1953 to analyse metal from a ship twenty-five to thirty feet across. A woman who had worked at Wright-Patterson recalled a sergeant boasting of bringing in alien bodies, and the base commander arriving within the hour with a secrecy form threatening a $20,000 fine and twenty years in jail. And a widow, Judy Woolcott, remembered a letter her husband wrote from Vietnam in 1965 describing a domed disc embedded in the sand near Kingman twelve years earlier, a letter she said came about a week before she learned he had been killed. Randle distrusted the researcher who found her, and he admitted the dates do not match. Still, he concluded, for all its faults the case \"is still better than the vast majority\" of crash stories and \"deserves more attention.\"\n\nSo the file stays open, by a crack. On one side, a witness who changed his craft from a twelve-foot cigar to a thirty-foot disc and confessed to lying once. On the other, an engineer with a solid career who swore, in writing, to what he saw, and a handful of second-hand voices that seem to point the same way. What remains, after all the checking, is a desk calendar page from May 1953, a pen that had run out of ink, and a single line about a job he could not write or talk about."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/CR-KIN1953-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Kingman crash (single witness), Near Kingman, Arizona, USA (approximate) — Topographically interesting hill outside of Kingman, Arizona.","by":"Renjishino","lic":"CC BY 3.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kingman_Arizona_rockpile_hill.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}