Arthur E. Exon

Career & Positioning

Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon was a senior United States Air Force officer who occupied uniquely crucial positions in the institutional handling of the Roswell incident's aftermath. In July 1947—precisely when Roswell wreckage was being transported to Wright Field for analysis—Exon was assigned there as a lieutenant colonel studying at the Air Force Institute of Technology, part of Air Materiel Command. Later, in August 1964, he was appointed Commander of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base itself, a position he held until 1968, making him one of the four or five highest-ranking officers at the facility responsible for logistics and administration.

Exon's Pentagon credentials were equally substantive. From 1955 to 1960, he served as a colonel at the Pentagon; in 1960 he became Chief of Ballistic Missiles, overseeing the deployment of the Jupiter Ballistic Missile system for NATO in Italy and Turkey. He was promoted to brigadier general on August 20, 1965, shortly before his Wright-Patterson assignment. These positions placed him at the apex of Cold War nuclear and aerospace command structures.

Roswell Knowledge & Testimony

Exon explicitly stated he had no firsthand involvement with the Roswell crash itself. He never examined the debris, saw the craft, or observed any recovered bodies. His knowledge came entirely through second-hand accounts: rumors and information shared by colleagues he trusted at Wright Field and, later, at the Pentagon during the mid-1950s.

Yet Exon was remarkably direct in his public conclusions. Speaking with researchers Kevin Randle and Donald R. Schmitt, he stated unequivocally that a spacecraft had crashed, that alien bodies were recovered, and that the U.S. government had covered it up. He claimed the debris was extraterrestrial, and that these issues had been debated at the White House level. Exon also reported that he later flew over the Roswell crash site by air, where he observed two distinct impact points, gouges in the terrain, and truck marks—physical evidence consistent with a major recovery operation.

The "Unholy Thirteen" & UFO Oversight

One of Exon's most striking claims concerned a secret UFO control committee. During his Pentagon assignment in the mid-1950s, he stated he encountered a highly classified committee composed of very high-ranking military officers and intelligence officials. Exon did not know its official name, so he privately called it the "Unholy Thirteen."

The significance of this claim lies in its possible connection to MJ-12 or similar secret oversight bodies. Exon's testimony, published by Randle and Schmitt in their widely-cited work, provided one of the earliest credible claims from a high-ranking officer that such a committee existed and operated with knowledge of a recovered extraterrestrial craft.

Critical Credibility Issues

Exon's testimony must be weighed against significant qualifications he himself introduced. In a September 1992 telephone conversation with researcher William Moore, Exon clarified that his claims about bodies and debris at Wright Field were "based solely upon rumors he heard from colleagues." When Stanton Friedman read portions of the Randle-Schmitt book to Exon over the phone, the general objected that they had "attributed considerably more to him than he had said" and reiterated his lack of firsthand knowledge.

These self-imposed caveats—entirely voluntary and unprompted—underscore both his apparent honesty and the fundamental limitation of his testimony: it is entirely derivative. Exon was never in a position to verify what he heard, only to report what trusted colleagues told him. This makes him a valuable witness to the consensus beliefs of senior Wright-Patterson and Pentagon officials regarding Roswell, but not an eyewitness to the events themselves.

Legacy & Assessment

Despite these limitations, Exon remains one of the most credible high-ranking military voices willing to affirm the extraterrestrial hypothesis for Roswell. His rank, his position at two institutions central to post-recovery analysis, his careful qualification of his own claims, and his willingness to speak on the record across multiple interviews over decades—make him an indispensable figure in the Roswell historical record. Whether one accepts his claims or not, Exon's testimony reflects how senior officers at the highest levels of the U.S. military and intelligence community apparently understood the Roswell event: as the recovery of a non-human craft.