There Was No Nurse Called Naomi Selff. There Was A Nurse.

XENIA, Ohio — Eleven women served in the Army Nurse Corps detachment at Roswell Army Air Field between June and October 1947.

We have all eleven. Five death certificates, three pension files, three living descendants. The genealogist who traced them was not told why she was doing it.

None of them was called Naomi Selff.

The account

The most repeated human detail in the whole Roswell story is a young Army nurse. She is said to have described an autopsy to a mortician in the town, to have been transferred abroad within days, and to have been killed weeks later in an aircraft accident.

It is the piece people remember, because it is the only piece with a person in it.

The register

The Army's consolidated register of deaths in aircraft accidents for 1947 and 1948 lists no Nurse Corps officer.

Not one. Not at Roswell, not in England, not anywhere, in two years.

Our correspondent read it at College Park over four days. Every entry is transcribed and published with this story so that anybody who thinks we skimmed it can check the arithmetic.

Where the name came from

We bought twenty-two cassettes from the estate of a researcher who worked the story from 1988, and one of them is the earliest recording of the mortician's account that anybody has produced.

At 31:44 on side B of the second cassette, the interviewer asks whether the nurse had a name. There is a pause of about four seconds. Then the interviewer says the name — offers it, twice, with an alternative spelling — and the mortician says that sounds right.

He does not recall it. He agrees to it.

Everything after 1989 descends from that afternoon. Nine books, a documentary watched by four million people, and roughly twenty-six thousand pages online. One book checked the roll, found nothing, and said so in a footnote on page 411 that has never been quoted.

The one who did disappear

Here is the part that survived our checking.

One of the eleven does vanish from Roswell without notice, in the third week of August 1947. She is on the roster in the first week of the month and gone from the strength return at the end of it, with no transfer order, no forwarding station and no entry in the detachment log beyond a pencil line through the name.

Lieutenant Ruth Bidwell-Ancona was twenty-three. She was separated from the service under the paragraph that then required the discharge of any pregnant servicewoman. It is one sentence long. The action was mandatory, it was initiated on 12 August and her travel pay was drawn on the twenty-first, and the whole of it took nine days.

She married in Ohio in November, had a daughter in December, worked as a school nurse in the same district from 1954 until 1979, and died in 1991.

What this desk takes from it

Everything the legend needs is here. A young Army nurse. A sudden departure from Roswell in the weeks after July 1947. No transfer order in the file. A woman who would not speak about the base for the rest of her life.

Every element is real, documented to the paragraph number, and the reason is a personnel regulation.

We had expected to end there, and her daughter's letter, printed below in full, is the reason we do not. She read this piece before publication and told us that we had turned her mother into a twist, and that a rule which discharged a qualified officer for being pregnant is not an anticlimax to anybody who was discharged by it.

The desk considered her objection for four days and could not answer it. We are publishing anyway, with her letter, and with her correction to our language: her mother was a lieutenant, it took her three years, and the certificate was in a drawer under the tablecloths.