by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
This is the third part in a series looking at a case involving a woman who claimed she was with Einstein as his assistant in 1947 when he went to examine a crashed flying saucer and aliens at a military base in the American Southwest. The case was originally investigated in 1993 by Mutual UFO Network affiliated researchers Leonard Stringfield and Sheila Franklin. Franklin got the woman’s story on tape and Stringfield wrote about it in his 1994 Status Report titled UFO Crash/Retrievals: Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors. As Einstein supposedly made the trip in 1947, Stringfield speculated that it might have involved the saucer that allegedly crashed at Roswell, and the woman told him, “I did hear that name pop up during my trip.” The woman had agreed to provide photos of the saucer and the aliens as well as documentation to back up her story, but these never materialized. According to Franklin and Stringfield, the woman was either lying or the victim of a Men-in-Black type campaign of harassment, surveillance, search, and seizure.
After a long period of dormancy, the tale was resurrected by Anthony Bragalia, who had just been a part of the Roswell Slides Fiasco. In that instance, slides showing what was reported to be an alien body from Roswell were presented as smoking gun evidence in 2015 before a paying audience in Mexico City. The body pictured in them turned out to be the mummified remains of a two-year-old boy.
It has become the norm with the Roswell case that as soon as one piece of evidence falls another rises up in its place, and this time, it was Bragalia doing the raising. He posted an article in October/November 2015 on his website UFO Explorations titled, “Einstein’s Secret Trip to View Roswell UFO Revealed in Taped Confession.” In Stringfield’s status report, Einstein was referred to as “The Professor,” and the woman as “Edith Simpson.” The tape was not made public and there was only Franklin’s retelling of what Simpson had said to give any indication of what was on it. Bragalia found Franklin who provided him with audio files of as much of the tape as she could find, and Bragalia includes them on his website. He reveals the woman’s name as Shirley Wright and identifies “The Professor” as Einstein.
Bragalia begins his report this way:
In a 1993 taped confession never before made public, Albert Einstein’s assistant in
the summer of 1947 made the stunning admission that she and the Professor were
flown to Roswell, New Mexico under government direction and examined the debris
and bodies resulting from the crash of an extraterrestrial vehicle.
Bragalia then presents a profile of Wright and emphasizes that she held two PhDs: one in chemistry and one in physical sciences. She died at age 85 in 2015, and Bragalia includes her obituary from the July 5, 2015 Miami Herald.
According to the obituary, Wright was a chemistry teacher for over 50 years at MDCC and became the first female president of the faculty senate there. She taught at the University of Miami, JMH School of Nursing, and Hialeah High School. It is also noted that she was a student of Einstein’s at Princeton.
Bragalia credits Stringfield and Franklin as being the ones who took Wright’s testimony and reported on it. He also gives details about how he found Franklin and received the audio files from her.
It’s one thing to read about someone making a fantastic claim and another to hear it straight from their mouths. We wrote about Jim Moseley running into this sort of situation in the early 1950s, when he heard about a woman who said she saw pictures of a crashed flying saucer that was taken through the military base where she worked on its way to Wright-Patterson. He discounted the story until he heard the woman on tape.
Moseley wrote about it in the January 1955 issue of Gray Barker’s publication, The Saucerian. According to him, as he listened to the tape his “whole attitude” changed. He describes being “immediately impressed with the apparent sincerity of her account.” Even after her superiors indicated she had made the story up and exaggerated her clearance level, Moseley still gave her the benefit of the doubt. If the reader takes the time to listen to the files of Wright’s interview, they may find themselves impressed by her “apparent sincerity” as well.
On Bragalia’s website there are two audio files named Shirley Wright November 1993 Part 1 and Part 2 that run 10:44 and 8:20 respectively. Part 1 begins with Wright saying “All I recall is several people using the word “Roswell,” and that must be where the crash occurred. . .” She describes the spaceship as badly damaged, disk-shaped, 1/4 the size of the hangar it was in, reflective when viewed from afar, and dull up close. She says she was not permitted inside but heard that there was equipment all along the perimeter and “things” that came up out of the floor.
In Part 2, Wright describes the aliens as being 5’-0” to 5’-5” tall, with greyish-green skin, no nose, no eyebrows, and large foreheads. She describes their eyes as brown-black, enormous, and having no pupils. She says they were wearing suits made from a fabric she couldn’t recognize, with no fasteners, shoes that looked like they were connected, and insignias. According to her on tape, there were eight dead aliens and one live alien and they communicated with “that one.” She later told Stringfield there were five dead aliens and one live alien.
In part 1, Wright describes there being telepathic communication between the aliens, and members of the assembled group of human observers. This is not mentioned in Stringfield’s, Franklin’s, or Bragalia’s report. In the course of the interview, Franklin asks, “did they ask you anything and did you ask them anything” and Wright starts using the pronoun “they” when describing the communication. According to Wright, the aliens were planning to colonize Earth but found it unsuitable. She says the group was told there were eight ships and that one crashed in the United States while one crashed in Siberia. Einstein is referred to as “the scientist” throughout Part 1.
At the beginning of Part 2, Franklin asks Wright about her security clearance, and Wright says she had clearance because of her work with Einstein, and mentions him by name. Franklin asks what it was called, and Wright answers that she’d have to “look that up.” Franklin asks how many aliens there were “originally” and Wright answers, “Nine. I saw nine. Eight bodies and then later we communicated with that one, so there were nine.”
Bragalia focused on Einstein in his efforts to “validate” Wright’s story, “even though Wright warned a paper trail of their Roswell trip would not be found. . .” According to Bragalia, the Albert Einstein Archives of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem produced a letter dated July 21, 1947, from “an associate” of Einstein’s inviting him on a sailing trip. Einstein regretfully declined, saying he was suffering from an ulcer. According to Bragalia, “The Fact that Einstein suffered an ulcer (perhaps exacerbated by stress) after viewing the Roswell artifacts about two weeks prior may in itself be significant.”
Bragalia also reached out to The Einstein Paper Project at Caltech. According to him, the assistant editor there told him that the senior editor “told her that Einstein did not leave Princeton in July of that year.” Bragalia notes that it was not explained where this information came from.
Bragalia includes an audio clip from a 1956 lecture in Detroit, Michigan by Frank Edwards, a radio broadcaster and author of the 1966 book Flying Saucers–Serious Business. In the clip, Edwards claims that Einstein intervened in the case of a “shoot ‘em down order” issued during the 1952 UFO flap in Washington D.C. According to Edwards, Einstein contacted President Truman and said, “Mr. President, anyone who can cross millions of miles of space will be able to take care of himself once he gets there. Don’t start something you can’t finish.”
According to Bragalia, “Einstein is known to have addressed the subject of intelligent extraterrestrials only four times.” The first instance Bragalia brings up is Einstein’s response in a January 1920 London Daily Mail to a reader wondering what Einstein thought about Guglielmo Marconi’s speculation that he was picking up radio signals from Mars. Einstein said he didn’t see why life should be limited to Earth, but he felt that if there are intelligent creatures out there, they would probably first try communicating using light, “the direction of which can be controlled much more easily,” instead of radio waves.
Bragalia then presents Einstein’s reply to evangelist Louis Gardener’s question to him about his thoughts on UFOs: “These people have seen something. What it is I do not know and I am not curious to know.” Curt Collins wrote about this as well and posted it on his website The Saucers That Time Forgot on May 25, 2023. Bragalia asks, “Since when does science shy away from encouraging finding solutions to mysteries?” According to Bragalia, “His reply was clearly a ‘dodge.’”
Next is Einstein’s November 12, 1952 letter to International Flying Saucer Bureau Director Albert K. Bender responding to his query regarding Einstein’s thoughts on saucers. Einstein replied: “Dear Sir: Having no experience and only superficial knowledge of the subject, I regret not to be able to comply with your request. Sincerely, Albert Einstein”
Finally, there was an article in the July 9, 1947 Irish Times where Einstein is said to have had “‘absolutely no comment’ to make” regarding the Roswell saucer story. Bragalia closes with this: “I think that we now know why the great Professor chose not to say a thing about the event: he was there and sworn to say nothing about it to anyone ever.”
Thanks to listener Palmer Murphy for recommending that we look into this story.