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Son of originator of 'Alien Autopsy' story casts doubt on father's credibility

Skeptical Inquirer,  July-August, 1997  by Timothy Spencer Carr

My father was Robert Spencer Carr, who achieved national fame in 1974 with the story of aliens in cold storage at Wright Patterson Air Force Base following a 1947 UFO crash in New Mexico. He died in 1994 at age eight-five in Dunedin, Florida, and as far as I know has no living relatives except me and my son. (His ashes are in my Atlanta workshop, waiting to be scattered in the headwaters of the Pecos River in New Mexico, not far from our home at the time of the alleged Roswell incident.) Now that he is gone, I finally feel free to speak out about the confabulations that so many gullible people have taken as gospel truth.

I am fifty-six, have a Ph.D. in social psychology, and have worked at the Georgia Department of Corrections for twenty-five years developing information systems, doing statistical reports, and studying the impact of criminal justice policy on crime, crowding, and recidivism. I decided to write this when, browsing the Internet, I found a site called "Robert Carr Alien Autopsy Discussion" on Critchley's UFO Sites on the Web (www.nmaa.org/member/skaeser/carr.htm). It is a lengthy verbatim transcript of the radio show on which my father first concocted the autopsy yarn.

Robert Spencer Carr was a child prodigy, publishing magazine articles before he was ten and an international best-selling novel entitled The Rampant Age (1928) when he was just seventeen, in the mid-1920s. He graduated from high school but never went to college or got any kind of advanced degree - yet he is called "Professor Carr" throughout the UFO literature. In many of his papers, he called himself "Dr. Carr." He started writing science fiction in 1948, right about the time when the alleged crash took place. His stories included one about flying saucers landing at the White House and the Kremlin, which he later published in a collection called Beyond Infinity (1951).

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With his brilliant and voracious mind, he absorbed a vast storehouse of information. He could start knowledgeable conversations with professionals in many disciplines - but he would invariably alienate them when he started acting as though he knew more about their fields than they did. To say he had a vivid imagination is an understatement. His imaginary world was more real to him than the real world. He often seemed unable - no, unwilling - to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

Often he mortified my mother and me by spinning preposterous stories in front of company or complete strangers. Tales included finding a Lost Horizon-like Shangri-la in New Mexico, befriending a giant alligator in the Florida swamps, and sharing complex philosophical ideas with porpoises in the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn't the tall tales themselves that hurt so much but his ferocious insistence that they were true. They weren't tongue-in-cheek; they weren't for fun; they weren't told with the license of a raconteur. They were dead serious, and you had by God better pretend you believed them or face wrath or rejection.

But when it came to flying saucers, he finally found an audience that would believe anything he said, no matter how bizarre or unlikely.

In the mid-1970s he came to Atlanta to give a talk at Georgia Tech and invited me to attend. It was called "Flying Saucers and the CIA," as I recall, and the auditorium started out packed with about five hundred students and professors. The serious-minded started trickling out almost from the beginning, when he refused to identify sources. The trickle turned into a mass exodus when somebody asked him if he, personally, had ever had direct, up-close contact with aliens, and he answered in his deep, mellifluous basso profundo, "Why, yes, as a matter of fact, on four separate occasions." By the end, there was left only a small adoring cadre of a couple dozen true-believers in the front rows, and me, flaming with shame in the lobby.

When my father died in April 1994, I phoned everybody in his address book. One was James Moseley, who publishes Saucer Smear (www.mcs.com/-kvg/smear.htm), a UFO newsletter of the skeptical stripe. Moseley asked my opinion about an interview he and some colleagues had with my semi-invalid father ten years earlier, in 1984, which he had promised not to print until after my father's death. The following is excerpted from the article that appeared in the August 1994 Saucer Smear:

[Carr] told us in some detail about a series of contacts he himself had had in 1983 with 3 1/2-foot-tall humanoids who visited his property in a space-ship about 11 months in a row, on nights when there was no moon. These creatures came in a 19-foot-diameter craft. There were three occupants, two of whom were able to "shield their minds" from Carr's telepathic powers, whereas the third could not. . . . Their craft always landed in the small garden under the deck of Carr's home, being extremely careful not to be seen by anyone other than Carr, who seemed to share their paranoia. . . . One of the people with us . . . was a highly trained nurse, and it was her opinion that Robert Carr believed what he was telling us about the extraterrestrial visits to his home, and that his experiences were hallucinations caused by his physical condition. On the other hand, [his son] Timothy Carr probably has the real answer. He informed us on the telephone recently that his father told these stories and several other similar ones just to make himself seem more interesting. And thus we close the file on Robert Spencer Carr. . . .


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