Category Archives: The Mausoleum at Roche Harbor, extraterrestrial life, Roswell NM

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