Shortly after an UNSOLVED MYSTERIES television show about Roswell, a man from Springfield, Missouri called the show's producers on the 800 number that they had set up. Gerald Anderson announced that he had additional information about the crash at Roswell and that he was willing to talk about it. This message was passed along to Roswell researchers Kevin Randle and Stanton Friedman.

On Feb 4, 1990, Kevin Randle was the first to do a phone interview with Anderson. Randle did not find the story told by Anderson to be very credible. However, Stanton Friedman later interviewed Anderson for the first time on Feb 16, 1990, and Friedman thought his tale was very convincing.

Randle claims that Gerald Anderson was five years old in July 1947. (Friedman says that Anderson was really six at the time.) Despite the years since the event and his extreme youth, Anderson said he still remembered everything in fantastic detail.

The First Story:
The story he told Randle and Friedman was that he, his brother Glenn, his father, his Uncle Ted and his cousin Victor (all of whom have passed away) had gone out to the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico to find some moss agates. He gave the date as July 5th, 1947. It was there that they came across a crashed "spaceship". Lying next to the ship were it's four passengers- two of them were not moving, one was having trouble breathing, and the fourth appeared to be unhurt.

His descriptions of these beings were that they were small, with eyes that were "oval-shaped, and very, very big. They were a bluish color. Not blue like in human eyes. sort of a milky blue." He said he had felt the spaceship, and found that was quite cold- he said it was freezing.

Almost immediately after finding the crash, he went on, five college students and their professor, who Anderson identified as "Dr. Buskirk", came upon the scene. They had been working on some cliff dwellings only a few miles away. Shortly after they got there, another man named Grady "Barney" Barnett joined them, and he was closely followed by the military, who appeared to be following Barnett.

(The second-hand stories from Barnett don't mention Anderson or his family. Something which Friedman, who believes both stories, chooses to ignore.)

The Story Continues:
In December 1990, Anderson gave an interview to the Springfield New Leader. In this interview, he revealed that he had a diary written by his Uncle Ted that had been passed on to him when his father died. This diary contained further details about the crashed saucer. Curiously, Anderson had neglected to mention this diary to Randle and Friedman when they first interviewed him.

Then on March 24, 1991, Anderson appeared on the "21st Century Radio's Hieronimus and Company" radio program hosted by Bob Oechsler. Anderson repeated his story, and again described the finding of the ship, the aliens, and the arrival of the military. But now, some changes appear in his memories.

Now, the arrival of the college students and Dr. Buskirk comes about 45 minutes later, not "shortly" as he had earlier remembered. He was able to remember now that they came from the University of Pennsylvania. And the alien's appearance had altered considerably. Anderson had first told Randle that the eyes were "milky-blue". Now he said "They (the alien's eyes) were enormous. They were very black and very large." Other changes to his earlier testimony appeared also.

Anderson's story became the centerpiece of the book Crash at Corona, by Friedman and Don Berliner in 1992. He also commanded almost thirty minutes of the 105 minute video "Recollections of Roswell II" made in 1992.

Dr. Buskirk:
Stanton Friedman arranged for Anderson to take a polygraph test, which was paid for by FUFOR. Robert Riggs, a member of the American Polygraph Association, was the examiner.

One of the questions asked was if Anderson had seen Dr. Buskirk since the incident- when he was 5 (or 6) years old. Anderson replied no, and Riggs did not see any deception in the reply. Indeed, Riggs informed Friedman that he had not found any evidence of deception by Gerald Anderson, nor any of pathology.

Meanwhile, Tom Carey, a researcher living in Pennsylvania, began an effort to look up the archaeologists. Carey reasoned that he would have written about the trip and the results of his studies of the cliff dwellings. When he found Dr. Winfred Buskirk, it turned out that he had been working on his PH.D dissertation in the summer of '47, which was later published as The Western Apache. Dr. Buskirk denied ever being in New Mexico in 1947. "I was in Arizona all of July 1947. I was certainly too busy on the reservation (Fort Apache Indian Reservation) to be engaged in any archaeological sideshow."

Anderson had earlier produced a "indentikit" sketch of the man he called Dr. Buskirk. This sketch was shown to Dan McKnight and his wife, who were friends of Dr. Buskirk. They easily identified the sketch as "Win Buskirk". When told about Dr. Buskirk's summer in Arizona, Anderson altered his story somewhat, saying that the archaeologist's name was Adrian Buskirk. But the description he had given, the indentikit sketch, and other details all fit Winfred Buskirk perfectly.

It was then that it was found out that Gerald Anderson had attended Albuquerque High School at the same time Dr. Buskirk was a teacher there. Anderson at first denied this, claiming he couldn't even remember what high school he had attended.

When Kevin Randle showed beyond any doubt that Anderson had attended Albuquerque High, he asked Anderson to provide him with a transcript, but Anderson refused. Instead he gave a copy of his transcript to John Carpenter. Friedman had previously arranged for psychiatric social worker John Carpenter to work with Gerald, which he did for more than a year. Carpenter was highly impressed by Anderson, and had become convinced that he was telling the truth.

The transcript Anderson gave Carpenter showed that he had taken a Sociology course at Albuquerque High, not Anthropology. He steadfastly refused to give this transcript to anyone else. But Dr. Buskirk was able to learn from friends he had at Albuquerque High School that "Gerald Anderson was in my Anthropology Class the 1st semester, then, according to the transcript, took a French class the second semester."

Uncle Ted's Diary:
Gerald Anderson first revealed the existence of his Uncle Ted's diary in his interview with the Springfield News Leader. He later turned over portions of the diary to the researchers, who found out that Uncle Ted was not very accurate. For instance, he recorded the Official Explanation that the Roswell Saucer Was Just a Balloon appeared in the Albuquerque newspapers on July 5th. The military gave this explanation out on July 8th, but most papers did not publish this until their July 9th editions.  And Uncle Ted's diary identified the location of the crash as near Magdalena, NM. Gerald later insisted that the site was near Horse Springs, NM, some 60 miles away.

The diary was then submitted to Richard Brunelle for forensic tests. Brunelle wrote a letter to Friedman on October 18, 1990, saying that while the paper could have been available in 1947, the "combination of dyes present in this ink was not used until approximately 1970."

Gerald's explanation was that his brother Glenn and Uncle Ted had occasionally copied the diary. Unfortunately for this story, Uncle Ted had passed away before this ink was made!

No other copy of the diary has since come to light to back up Gerald Anderson's claims.

The Phone Bill:
As the discrepancies were being revealed, Kevin Randle was becoming a vocal critic of Anderson and his story. In response, Anderson produced a phone bill, which he claimed showed that Randle was lying about the length of the phone interview he had given back on February 4, 1990. Randle had said that it lasted more than 50 minutes, but the phone bill Anderson was showing said it lasted less than 30 minutes.

Trouble was, Randle had a tape of the phone interview, which was clearly over 50 minutes.

John Carpenter, who had been a staunch supporter of Gerald, checked with the phone company, and was able to produce the original statement, which clearly indicated that Anderson had altered the phone bill he was offering as "proof". Carpenter wrote, "I finally was able to learn that Gerald had indeed had a friendly 54-minute phone call, just as Randle had claimed."

Anderson finally had to admit that he had indeed altered his statement.

(A more detailed account of the hoaxed phone bill, including photocopies of the phone bills, can be found in the Jul/Aug 1992 International UFO Reporter.)

John Carpenter added "We now knew four things about Gerald Anderson: (1) He was capable of constructing a clever fake phone bill. (2) He had admitted lying to us about the first phone bill. (3) He had just been caught lying to all of the gathered researchers about this 28-minute phone bill (which means that he had just constructed another phony!), and (4) Gerald was now avoiding us."

Epilogue:
Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner finally were forced to disavow their star witness in a letter to the editor published in the Jan. 1993 issue of the MUFON UFO Journal. They publicly stated that they "no longer have confidence in the testimony of Gerald Anderson, who claims to have stumbled upon a crash site with members of his family. Anderson has admitted falsifying a document and so his testimony about finding wreckage of a crashed flying saucer near the Plains of San Augustin in western New Mexico, can no longer be seen as sufficiently reliable."

However, Friedman and Berliner went on "This does not mean (we) feel there was no crash at the Plains of San Augustin; There is considerable impressive testimony to such an event. Nor does it mean that everything reported by Gerald Anderson is without value."

The editor of the Journal, Dennis Stacey, rightly commented: "Although, it strongly suggests it!

Eplilogue #2:
Five year later, there appeared this Repudiation of the Repudiation.  In 1998, Stanton Friedman wrote:

"However, despite the negative comment by Don Berliner about some problems with Gerald, at the beginning of the 2nd Edition of Crash at Corona, I am still a Gerald Anderson booster.. though not so much of a Don Berliner Booster. I saw Gerald in Roswell in 1997, I think. I was in his home with an Argentinean reporter arranged by me.

"I was disappointed about the phone bill business as Gerald knows. But I have still defended him to various and sundry including fiction writer and anti abduction propagandist Kevin Randle."

When it was pointed out that this was indeed different than what had been published before, Friedman wrote:

"I had forgotten the MUFON JOURNAL letter. in 1993. Yes I have definitely not fully accepted that position. and yes, I do have problems with some of John Carpenter's activities. The phone bill was the fraudulent document. I was probably at fault for keeping Gerald appraised of the nefarious activities of Randle... which would have made anybody ready to trick Randle."

[...]

"I perhaps should add that I like Gerald and that Berliner wrote the letter and almost all of Crash at Corona. There were well over 20 pages that I had written and wanted in. No such luck. I also wanted more in the extra chapter in the 1997 50th anniversary Edition of Crash at Corona. No luck. He was furious with me about TOP SECRET/MAJIC because the SOM 1.01 report was partially included."

Additional sources of information:

- Crash at Corona by Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner, Paragon House, New York, 1992

- The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, M. Evans and Company, Inc., New York, 1994

- A History of UFO Crashes by Kevin Randle, Avon Books, New York, 1995.

- Skeptics UFO Newsletter (SUN) Nov 1991

- SUN Mar 1992

- SUN Nov 1992

- SUN Mar 1991

- SUN Mar 1993