"Hundreds of Witnesses"
  In the pro-UFO community, much fanfare has been made over the years about
the "dozens" or even "hundreds of eye-witnesses" to the alleged UFO crash
near Roswell.
  If the near-holy reverence for the number of alleged witnesses surrounding
the Roswell affair were limited to just the UFO buffs who have conducted no
direct research of their own, this situation might be understandable. 
owever,
 this is not the case, for the authors of numerous Roswell books play the
numbers game as well.
  In the pro-UFO book The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Kevin Randle
and Donald Schmitt note the fact that Bill Moore, coauthor of The Roswell
Incident (1980), interviewed "more then seventy witnesses who had some
knowledge of the [Roswell UFO crash] event." Indeed, both Friedman and Moore,
around the time of the initial publication of The Roswell Incident, boasted
that they had interviewed more than "ninety witnesses."
  While these double-digit figures are certainly accurate, the presentation
of such a seemingly impressive number of witnesses by themselves, without
qualification, is misleading. The relevant issue is not how many witnesses
were interviewed, but rather what type of witnesses (i.e., firsthand,
secondhand), and how truthful and accurate their statements were.
  Unfortunately, a careful reading of Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz's
Roswell Incident reveals that, despite the impressive claim of having
"interviewed more than seventy witnesses," the testimonies of just twenty-
five people are presented. Out of these twenty-five, only seven of them are
firsthand sources who claim to have seen the alleged saucer debris, and one
of these accounts is suspect. Of these seven people, however, only five claim
to have actually handled the material personally, and one of them is adamant
that it was not from an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
  The remainder of the professed "witnesses" cited in The Roswell Incident
are either secondhand sources (whose testimonies constitute hearsay) or
people who saw no wreckage at all or were never present at the "debris field"
during the critical time. In other words, they are not actually witnesses in
the true sense of the word.
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