Roswell UFO Report, Crash Test Dummies

Re “Roswell Report Doesn’t Fly,” editorial, June 26:

I am a British ex-RAF pilot with service before and during World War II. I also was a POW in Germany three years. In 1947 I was in La Jolla and was a guest at the U.S. naval officers club in San Diego. One night I was asked to dine with an officer and his wife at their home in Coronado. That night her husband was on night operations, flying off the carrier. About 8 p.m. his wife remarked her husband was awfully late.

About 20 minutes later the phone rang and she excused herself to answer it in the bedroom. I heard a sort of wail and she came into the living room totally distraught. Her husband had crashed at sea and was presumed lost. In the last radio report from him he said he was chasing a UFO!

GEORGE PELLING

Laguna Hills

Some 50 years ago, as a staff photographer for Life magazine, I was sent to Roswell, N.M., to photograph what the Life called a “meteor hunt.” All we knew at the time was that a “huge meteor” had crashed somewhere in the New Mexico desert and the Air Force was searching for it. I was assigned an Air Force pilot who would put me on the ground in the vicinity of the sighting.

Landing somewhere in the desert on a makeshift runway, I was handed my cameras and an automatic pistol in a holster. “What do I need that for?” I asked. The pilot responded, “My orders were to see that you were armed.”

“Against what?” I asked.

He looked at me, smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know,” he said. I got into a Jeep with a driver and off we went into the sunbaked desert on this mysterious search that is now known as the Roswell incident.

Of course we never found the “meteor” and I have often wondered if I had arrived too early or too late. Or, perhaps I was landed in the wrong place.

ALLAN GRANT

Los Angeles

I developed an anthropomorphic dummy in my company, then in New York, while a rival company in California developed another. This is not about who was the first, it is about the fact that neither of us had sufficient talent to place dummies, which we developed in 1953, into balloons to carry them aloft in 1947, as stated by Col. John Haynes of the Air Force.

On the subject of “crash test dummies,” which became a staple in the development of auto safety systems: For each life of a child or small adult lost because of present air bag systems, 30 other lives are saved. It would take several years of crash statistics to know whether the speed of deployment is optimum or not. Such decisions should not be made because biomechanically ignorant people appeal for cooperation between opposing advocates.

SAMUEL W. ALDERSON

Beverly Hills