Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [75]
To this day there is no doubt in Manley Stampler’s mind that Harry Truman was in violation of the law. “This guy was blockin’ traffic, so I pulled him over—that’s all there was to it.” But he let him off with just a warning. “I wasn’t going to give him a ticket—he was the president of the United States.” Here Manley paused for a moment. “Maybe some other presidents, but not Harry Truman.” As for Truman’s claim that he only pulled him over to shake hands, Manley laughed. “I don’t remember shaking his hand. Didn’t ask him for an autograph, either. Wish I had. Might be worth something today.”
Back at the barracks at the end of his shift, Manley casually said to his desk sergeant, “You’ll never guess who I pulled over today.” The sergeant excitedly phoned the Bedford Gazette, and the next day the story appeared in newspapers nationwide. The press had a field day. “From the standpoint of the personal safety of one of America’s two living ex-presidents,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial, “we hope Mr. Truman will exercise greater care in the future. Fortunately Private Stampler was forbearing. He didn’t give the ex-president a ticket. But the next time—who knows?”
After Manley Stampler pulled them over, neither wire services nor major newspapers made any mention of the Trumans until they checked into a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, at noon the following day, Monday, July 6. After all the attention their trip had received so far, it was almost as if they had fallen off the face of the earth for nearly a day. The 250-mile trip from Bedford to Columbus should have taken no more than five hours. When they arrived in Columbus, they were vague about their whereabouts the previous night. Harry would only say they’d stopped in a “small town east of Columbus.”
What’s even more bizarre is that Harry and Bess went missing on the sixth anniversary of a most peculiar event—an event that undoubtedly piqued the curiosity of then-President Truman, who had more than a casual interest in the phenomenon it represented. The event has come to be known as the Roswell Incident.
Although the precise chronology is still much disputed, many researchers believe July 5, 1947, is the date on which a rancher named Mac Brazel discovered some unusual debris on his ranch in southeastern New Mexico. The debris consisted of a metallic, aluminum foil–like substance that couldn’t be ripped or burned, and some pieces of wood inscribed with what looked like hieroglyphics. The next day, Brazel drove seventy-five miles to the nearest town, Roswell, and walked into the Chaves County Sheriff’s Office with two cardboard boxes filled with some of the debris. Sheriff George Wilcox agreed the stuff looked strange, and he contacted the local air force base.
The next day the air force sent two men to Brazel’s ranch to collect the rest of the debris. On July 8, the base issued a press release, which was nicely summarized in the headline of that afternoon’s edition of the Roswell Daily Record: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The wire services picked up the story.
Unidentified flying objects were very much on Americans’ minds that summer. Less than two weeks before Mac Brazel took that strange debris into Roswell, a thirty-two-year-old Idaho businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold had seen something strange in the sky while flying his small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state. At 2:59 P.M. on Tuesday, June 24, 1947, Arnold saw nine disc-shaped objects moving in formation at a speed he estimated to be in excess of a thousand miles per hour. He said they looked like “flying saucers,” a name that stuck. On July 4, several dozen people attending an Independence Day picnic in Twin Falls, Idaho, reported seeing