The Cape Girardeau crash
The account
A minister was called to give last rites at a plane crash and found a disc and non-human bodies.
What investigators found
The story rests on a family account told fifty years later, with no document or living eyewitness.
The story
Six years before Roswell, one night in 1941, Baptist minister Reverend William Huffman was supposedly called to a farm near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to pray over the victims of a plane crash. At the site, the story goes, there was a disc-shaped object and three small bodies that did not look human. Military personnel allegedly collected everything and asked for silence.
The case only surfaced in 1991, when Charlette Mann, the minister's granddaughter, shared the memory with researcher Leonard Stringfield. Recent books have tried to bolster the account, but there is no newspaper record, military document or living eyewitness. For skeptics, it is a family memory that grew into a legend.