By Kimberly Mayer
A short walk in the woods from my home sits The Mausoleum at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. Not one visit do I make to the memorial that I don’t mourn my grandfather. It isn’t grandpa who is buried there, it’s the McMillin family, but like John S. McMillin, the paternal head of the family, my grandfather was a businessman and a mason. I tend to linger at the mausoleum, as if the stone edifice could answer some of my questions.
My grandfather was warm, loving, and would give the shirt off his back to anyone. But he was mum about The Masonic Order. As children we’d clamor around him asking countless questions about his Masonic ring, and he’d just smile and laugh and bounce us on his lap. I can still feel his firm hugs and the texture of his wool cardigan sweaters even in summer. But I will never hear the story. He took it with him.
Now I know members are pledged to secrecy with the masonic oath, but John S. McMillin’s colossal mausoleum is fraught with masonic signs and symbols. They’re etched in the arches, carved on the steps, and depicted by a large round limestone table surrounded by chairs that serve as crypts on a platform encircled by Roman columns. It’s a tomb on a rise in the woods. The story as McMillin saw it.
My friend’s grandfather was a VP with one of the world’s largest companies specializing in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. In the 1940’s he was approached by The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first centralized intelligence agency in the country and predecessor to the CIA. Suddenly he was whisked away, multiple times, from New York to Roswell, New Mexico. His family was informed of nothing.
The most they ever heard of his involvement in Roswell may have been in 1977 when my friend took her grandparents to the theatre to see Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which had just been released. Leaving the theatre at the conclusion of the film, her grandfather muttered, “That’s not the way it happened.” And that’s all he ever said on the subject. He too took it with him.
Just as I may never know what The Masonic Order meant to my grandfather, some kind of deep secrecy still shrouds us all eighty years after the 1947 crash site near Roswell, New Mexico.
Originally published April 9, 2025 in The Journal of the San Juan Islands
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 
Boy, I love a good mystery and have always been enthralled by history. My first recollection as a child was of the psychiatric hospital that stood empty in Williamsburg, Virginia cloaked in a shroud of secrecy. Well before mental health diagnostics were available, the hospital built in 1773 was the first public facility in the present-day United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Somehow, I could feel at a young age that the structure was clamoring to tell its story…but I digress.
As a New Mexican, Roswell and extraterrestrial beings are a central point of UFO lore. As is said, decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings.
During the first week in July, 1947, something fell to Earth near the tiny New Mexican town of Corona and was retrieved by members of the 509th Bomb Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces stationed near Roswell, New Mexico.
Rancher W.W. “Mac” Brazel found the wreckage which included rubber strips, tinfoil, and thick paper on his property 75 miles north of Roswell. The U.S. Army Air Forces at the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) sent out a press release that appeared in the local Roswell paper announcing they’d recovered a “flying disc” from Brazel’s ranch.
The following day the government and the Air Force collected all the Roswell papers and changed their story claiming that what was at first thought to be a ‘flying saucer’ was actually debris from a weather balloon. A picture was included of Major Marcel with pieces of the supposed weather balloon debris.
Later, after years of questions about the incident, the Air Force admitted the weather-balloon story was fabricated to cover up a top-secret project called Project Mogul designed to detect atomic activity over the Soviet Union with high-altitude balloons.
However, after Major Marcel retired from the Air Force, he revealed his belief that the debris was extraterrestrial. In a 1980 interview, Marcel said that the woodlike debris could not be burned and the thin metal couldn’t be bent.
Jumping ahead, at the 2024 UFO hearings in Congress, the ‘foil’ or thin metal (which has been reported elsewhere since the Roswell incident) was described as like no other metal that we have on earth and far superior in its capabilities than anything we have.
An eye witness, Escondido resident Milton Sprouse said he knows what happened in Roswell — not because he favors one theory over another, but because he was there. As for the outrageous stories of mysterious metal, alien corpses and a military coverup – he said it is all true.
Sprouse said five men from his ground crew went to the ranch and they claimed that what they saw was “out of this world.” The crew reported seeing objects such as metallic foil that when crumpled, would unfold without a crease.
Sprouse recalled people speaking about “alien bodies” immediately after the debris discovery. “They took the bodies to a hangar, and there were two guards at each door with machine guns,” he said. Then the remains were loaded into the rancher Brazel’s flatbed truck and he was instructed to bring them to the Roswell Hospital and to not look at his cargo.
Sprouse said his friend and barracks mate, was an emergency-room medic who reported seeing what he called “humanoid” bodies in the Roswell hospital. Two doctors and two nurses were called in to review the remains. They reportedly dissected two of the humanoid bodies and then both doctors and nurses were immediately transferred.
Sprouse said his friend shared, ‘We don’t think the humanoid ate food’ since there was no digestive system. Like the doctors and nurses, Sprouse’s friend suddenly was transferred, and he never heard from him again.
Fascinating. Since the Roswell incident, there have been many other plausible and perplexing UFO sightings in New Mexico and Northwestern Texas.
More to be revealed, but somehow my dear friend’s curiosity and interests always dovetail with mine. xo
Why oh why don’t you have your own blog? That is the mystery to me! You and Kim have such a gift.🥰
Jane, this is a remarkable compilation of events at Roswell. I only wish we could hear the rest.
I am sure I can speak for Kim and myself when I say having this 3-way connection is such a treat. Always love seeing your responses. xo