United States.Cape Girardeau · a pastor reportedly saw a wreck and three bodies

The oldest written version of the account is a letter from Charlette Mann, a Texas resident, dated May 6, 1991 and published that year by researcher Leonard Stringfield in his report "UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum" (Status Report VI), after researcher Raymond Fowler forwarded him an earlier letter of hers. Mann did not hear the story from her grandfather, Reverend William Huffman (born 1888, ordained Baptist minister, died September 1959): she learned it from her father and, above all, from her grandmother Floy, who lived in her home before dying in 1984.

According to the letter, at about 9 to 9:30 one evening in the spring of 1941, the Cape Girardeau (Missouri) police called Huffman: they had received reports that a plane had crashed outside of town and asked him to go in case someone needed him. He was picked up by a car that, per his wife, was not a police car. They drove some 13 to 15 miles, parked by the side of the road and walked a quarter of a mile into a field where a fire was burning.

There, still according to the letter, Huffman saw a broken craft scattered around, with one large piece still together, rounded, with no edges or seams and a very shiny metallic finish; inside was something like a metal chair and a panel with many dials and gauges. Police officers, plainclothes people and military men were already sifting through the wreckage. Three "not human" bodies had been taken out and laid on the ground; Huffman prayed over them without touching them. They had no injuries or burns, were about four feet tall like a child, with large heads, long arms, very large oval eyes, no hair and no ears, and were covered head to foot in what looked like wrinkled aluminum foil. Several people were taking pictures, and two plainclothes men held one of the bodies up under its arms for a photograph. A military officer told him not to talk about it for security reasons.

Several details that circulate today are not in that letter: that one of the beings was still alive and died in front of Huffman, that the minister administered last rites (a rite foreign to Baptist practice), the "hieroglyphics" inside, or the location south of town. They appear in later retellings, such as Paul Blake Smith's book "MO41, The Bombshell Before Roswell." The story of the photograph also changed. In the letter nobody confiscates it: about two weeks after the event, Huffman came home with a copy of the picture of the two men holding the being; after his death Mann's father kept it and lent it to a close friend when she was 10 or 11, and never got it back. Later versions attribute the photo to a member of the congregation (Garland D. Fronabarger has been named) or to a local reporter whose picture the military supposedly seized.

Stringfield himself noted a red flag: the description of a being with outstretched arms held up by two men in wide-brimmed hats reminded him of a photograph published in a Cologne newspaper in 1950 and declared an April Fool's hoax. Mann replied on June 6, 1991 that her photo was different: no overcoats, no women, a larger being.

No institution has found any trace of the event. In response to queries from TV station KFVS12, the FBI said it was unable to identify responsive records, and the Air Force that it found no documentation, not even in the histories of the Air Corps Training Detachment at Sikeston. Ryan Wood, who championed the case at the 2001 MUFON symposium, admitted he had found no confirmation in police or fire department records either. James Westwood, a former Navy officer, spent a week in Cape Girardeau in 1998–1999; the Southeast Missourian ran a feature with his phone number so witnesses could call, and nobody called.

According to what Westwood told Philip Klass's Skeptics UFO Newsletter (Winter 2001–02), retired physicist Harley Rutledge, who had investigated sightings in the region for years, had never heard of a crashed saucer, and an article in the newspaper's own archive showed that Huffman and his family did not move to Cape Girardeau until November 1941, which makes the event impossible in the spring of that year as told. Westwood says he sent that article to Wood in June 1999. Supporters of the case suggest the year or season was misremembered, but no document places such a crash on any other date.

Had it happened as told, Cape Girardeau would be an account of a crashed craft with recovered non-human bodies six years before Roswell, and the starting point of the "recovery and cover-up" tradition that runs to the present. That is why it is cited so often, and why what it rests on matters.

It rests on a single oral chain. The witness died in 1959; his wife told her granddaughter before 1984, and the granddaughter put it in writing in 1991, half a century after the event. There is no contemporary document, no surviving photograph and no independent witness. Nor is there a demonstrated hoaxer or a concrete alternative explanation: no source proposes an ordinary event, such as a real plane crash or a family memory of some other incident, as the seed of the story.

What does exist points the other way. The one archival check with a verifiable result, the date Huffman arrived in town, makes the event impossible on the date the account gives, and the story has kept gaining details (a living being, last rites, hieroglyphics, a confiscated photo) as it moved away from its first written version: that is how legends grow, not how testimony sharpens. Researchers such as Ryan Wood have taken it seriously for the consistency of Mann's testimony over the years, but that is the consistency of a single source, and the only physical evidence ever claimed, the photograph, has been lost for more than sixty years.