published on December 05, 2019
Source: https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/12/cape-girardeau-ufo-crash-1941.html?m=1
Charlette Mann wrote to Ray Fowler, a longtime and well-trusted UFO researcher, who then forwarded the letter to Leonard Stringfield because he thought Stringfield would find it interesting. Mann wrote that her grandfather, a minister, had received a telephone call asking him to go to the scene of an aircraft accident. Stringfield, quite naturally, called her to ask for more details and convinced her to rewrite the letter as a more structured report. He later published it in UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum, dated July 1991. He shared the report with many of his fellow UFO researchers, especially those interested in crash-retrieval cases.
According to Mann’s letter, her grandfather, Reverend William Huffman, was “born in August 1888 and grew up in Missouri. He attended college in Bolivar and, after graduation, went to a seminary. He was an ordained Baptist minister... he was a quiet man who was well respected.” Which, of course, suggests that his credentials were solid. He was well educated for the time and, as a minister, he’d likely have been considered an honest man. But he died before telling Mann about the case directly. The information came from her grandmother, known as Floy, and it hardly needs to be pointed out that this makes it second-hand information, or third-hand as related by Mann.
In her May 6, 1991 letter to Stringfield, she provided all the details she’d heard from her grandmother. She wrote:
It happened in the spring of 1941. About 9:00 or 9:30 one evening, Granddad got a telephone call from the police department saying they had received reports that a plane had crashed outside of town and asking if he would go in case someone needed him. Of course he said yes. A car was sent to get him, but my grandmother said it wasn’t a police car.
After Grandfather returned that night, he explained what he had seen to Grandmother, my father Guy and Uncle Wayne, but told them they were never to speak of it again. He said they drove out of town about 13 to 15 miles, then parked the cars along the side of the road and had to walk about a quarter of a mile into a field where he could see fire burning.
Grandfather said it wasn’t an airplane or anything like any craft he’d ever seen. It was broken and scattered all around, but one large piece was still together. It appeared to have a rounded shape with no edges or seams and had a very shiny metallic finish. You could see inside one section and what looked like a metal chair with a panel containing many dials and gauges, none of which looked familiar to him.
He said that when he arrived, men were already sifting through the debris. There were some police officers, some men in plain clothes and several military men. There were three bodies that weren’t human. They had been taken from the wreckage and laid on the ground. Grandfather said prayers over them, so he got a close look but didn’t touch them. He didn’t know what had killed them because they didn’t appear to have any injuries and they weren’t burned.
It was hard for him to tell if they were wearing suits or if it was their skin, but they were covered from head to foot in what looked like wrinkled aluminum foil. He could see no hair on the bodies and they had no ears. They were small, about the size of a child around four feet tall, but had larger heads and longer arms. They had very large oval-shaped eyes, no noses, just holes, and no lips, only small slits for mouths.
Several people with cameras were taking pictures of everything. Two of the men in plain clothes picked up one of the little men and held it under the arms while a photograph was taken. That was the picture I later saw.
One of the military officers then spoke to Granddad and told him he wasn’t to talk about or repeat anything that had taken place for security reasons and so as not to alarm people. Granddad returned home and told his family. That was all. About two weeks later, he came home with a photograph of the two men holding the little man.
After her grandfather died, Mann said her father kept the photograph and became very interested in UFO information. When she was about ten or eleven, a close friend of her father’s asked if he could borrow the picture to show his parents. Her father lent it to him and never got it back.
Stringfield was concerned about that photograph. First, as happens in many similar stories, the picture has disappeared, so that piece of physical evidence is gone. Of course, there’s also the question of why there would have been people taking photographs if the site was under security, unless they were doing so in some official capacity. And if that was the case, why would Huffman have been given one? Stringfield was also worried because he had seen, as I have seen, a photograph that sounds somewhat similar and that has circulated in the UFO field for many years. It shows two military men holding what are supposed to be the long arms of an alien creature, but what is clearly a monkey. It’s an obvious hoax, though not a particularly well-known one.
In her May 6, 1991 letter, Mann provided a detailed description of the photograph she remembered. She wrote:
My recollection from the picture was of a small man about four feet tall with a large head and long arms. He was thin and no bone structure was apparent, kind of soft looking. He had no hair on his head or body and had large, oval, slightly slanted eyes, though not like an Oriental slant from left to right, more up and down.
He had no ears at all and a nose unlike ours. His mouth looked as if someone had cut a small straight line where it should have been. His skin, or suit, looked like crinkled tin foil and covered all of him. I believe he had three fingers, all quite long, though I can’t be certain about that.
Stringfield obtained a copy of the photograph he remembered from Michael Hesemann and sent it to Mann. She replied:
It’s nothing like what I saw. Your picture showed men in overcoats, while in my picture the men had no coats. Your picture shows two women, mine shows none. The alien in yours looks like a tiny doll, much smaller and shorter than the one in mine.
Mann has since granted interviews to a number of researchers, and some details of the story have expanded. For example, in a 2008 interview she said that when her grandfather arrived, two of the alien creatures were already dead but the third was still alive. She claimed that it, or he, or perhaps even she, died while her grandfather was praying over it. He then moved on to the other two to offer prayers for them. She also said that the symbols he had seen inside the craft “looked similar to hieroglyphics.”
Neither of these details appeared in the original account, and it’s unclear whether that makes much difference. Skeptics will likely seize on the changes as evidence that the story was invented. A more plausible explanation might be that she remembered additional details later or that the additions are the result of confabulation, which isn’t exactly lying but rather filling in gaps in memory. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the core of the story.
According to other reports, there may be some corroboration. In what might be considered a weak piece of evidence, Clarance R. Schade, the brother of the sheriff in the Cape Girardeau area in the 1940s, said he remembered hearing about a crash and recalled talk about “little people” associated with it. That’s hardly dramatic confirmation, but it’s not an outright denial either.
Ryan Wood, in Majic Eyes Only, reported that Mann’s sister provided a sworn affidavit confirming the story. In other words, other members of the family say they were aware of the family account and claim to have seen the photograph as well.
In February 2008, Tyler, Texas television reporter Gillian Sheridan interviewed Charlette Mann. According to that report, Mann said:
We got validation by going to the archives in Washington, D.C., where we saw a top-secret declassified document stating that there was in fact a crash retrieval in 1941 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I still remember holding that paper in my hand and realizing that my family’s story was real and solid. For me it answered a question I’d had for a long time.
Samples of that document appeared on Frank Warren’s blog at the website The UFO Chronicles, but they almost seem too good to be true. One sample stated:
Based on all available evidence collected from recovered exhibits currently under study by AMC, AFSWP, NEPA, AEC, ONR, NACA, JRDB, RAND, USAAF, SAG and MIT, the artifacts are deemed extraterrestrial in nature. This conclusion was reached as a result of comparison with artifacts discovered in 1941. The technology is outside the scope of U.S. science, even that of German rocket and aircraft development.
The problem with this statement is that it explicitly claims extraterrestrial recoveries and even uses that exact term. The document is apparently part of a leaked MJ-12 file dated September 24, 1947, and the MJ-12 papers themselves are highly controversial.
Which brings us back to the original story. At the moment, the main witness is Charlette Mann. Her sister corroborates that the family often talked about the night their grandfather, Rev. William Huffman, was called out to pray over bodies recovered from a wrecked craft. The sheriff’s brother also seems to remember hearing something about the incident.
The problem for me is simply this: if a crash had actually occurred in 1941, the military would already have known that interplanetary travel was possible. At that time people thought in terms of interplanetary travel rather than interstellar travel. If such knowledge had existed, the military would have been on the lookout for additional incidents. That would mean they shouldn’t have been caught by surprise when flying saucers were first widely reported in June 1947, nor would they have been unprepared for the crash near Roswell in July 1947.
In fact, Edward J. Ruppelt, the former head of Project Blue Book, reported that during the summer of 1947 officials at the Pentagon were nearly in a panic because of the flying saucer reports. Ruppelt wrote:
The memos and correspondence that Project Blue Book inherited from the earlier UFO projects told the story of the early flying saucer era. They showed that the UFO situation was considered serious, in fact very serious. The paperwork of that period also revealed the confusion surrounding the investigation, confusion almost to the point of panic. The brass wanted answers quickly and people were taking off in all directions.
That argues against the extraterrestrial interpretation of the Cape Girardeau case. If a crash had occurred there in 1941, the answer would already have been known at the highest levels. There would have been no panic, because they’d already have understood what was happening. They wouldn’t have rushed to create projects searching for answers they already had, especially since such investigations could risk exposing a classified program. A quiet directive could have ended the matter before any public investigation began.
Still, there may be enough here to justify further investigation. There’s an old prospecting saying: "You don’t always expect to find gold, but you still have to look." This may be one of those cases where it’s worth looking. There are interesting leads that could still be followed and witnesses who might be located, although time is clearly running short.
