Keeping it Secret

Here’s an odd synchroncity involving two friends who played together in a band. One was  a UFO researcher and the other held a secret about UFOs.

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Jim Lorenzen and his wife Coral were early UFO researchers, who in 1952 formed a UFO research group called Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). In the late 1960s, the couple wrote UFOs Over the Americas (1968) and UFOs the Whole Story (1969). Jim was also a professional musician who played bass guitar and owned Lorenzen Music Enterprises in Tucson, Arizona.

For several years, Jim played in a band that had a regular gig at the Eldorado Lodge. Jim was always looking for new cases and one day told his band mate, Irwin Fortman, that he wouldn’t be able to make it to the lodge Saturday because a UFO had been spotted at White Sands. He was going to investigate.

Fortman nodded and said he would find a bass player to fill in for him. In the years they played together, Irwin was well aware of Jim’s preoccupation, that he was one of the best known UFO researchers of the day. But Irwin never revealed his secret to Jim. He never told him that he was a participant in the most famous UFO incident of all time – Roswell. Not only had he seen the crashed ship, but he had moved one of the bodies. That was his story, that was his secret.

Writer Ray Grasse was the first person outside Fortman’s immediate family to hear about Fortman’s experience. In an interview, published in 2012, Grasse asked him why he never told Jim Lorenzen about his experience.

IF: Yeah, you know, I kept thinking about the promise I made (to the government) that I would keep my mouth shut, and yet I was very interested, but I stayed away from it. Like when Jim called me the night before he made that trip to White Sands New Mexico — we had a steady engagement at the old El Dorado lodge, I had a band there for seventeen years and Jim was playing bass with my group — and Jim said to me, “I’ve got to go up to White Sands, they’ve spotted a UFO up there, and they’ve got quite a bit of information.” I said, ‘Look Jim, that’s no problem. I’ll just get somebody else to fill in.’ I could’ve said, “Well Jim, you know, if you really believe in that kind of thing…” But I knew I couldn’t tell him how much I believed in it myself, you know.

RG: But you did eventually tell him what happened, didn’t you? IF: Oh, no, no! I wouldn’t take a chance. Because Jim had that magazine there and you know, he was a very open guy. If somebody gave him information and he felt it was something that should be repeated, which I know this would have been, I would have felt that I’d be jeopardizing my family.

RG: Considering how he was one of the foremost researchers on UFOs at the time, I imagine that must have been frustrating for you not to talk about it.

IF: Right, it sure is.

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Fortman’s story hasn’t received much attention because it differs from the standard Roswell tale of a crash near Roswell in July of 1947. In Fortman’s version, there were two crashes and he was involved in the second one in December of that year.

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