Who is John Garretson?: Part 2 (Preview)

            Writers Note: Last week, we ran Part I about John Garretson from Eagle, ID, a man who has never visited Garretson, SD but has begun to invest in the town with the same last name. While he has recently discovered his ancestry to A.S. Garretson, the railroad investor who is the namesake of Garretson, SD, diverged in the late 1600’s in Pennsylvania, he still feels a connection to this community and has been deepening his relationships with different folks who live here.

John has lived a very interesting life, from experiencing the Roswell, NM “alien incident” of 1947 to his career as a nuclear engineer. The Gazette felt a full profile was a great way for our community to get to know the man with the last name Garretson.

John, who was born in Salem, IA in 1932, moved eight different times before high school due to his father’s job (his father, who was a mechanical engineer, was instrumental in starting three different companies- Bailey Meter Co., Phillips Petroleum, and Sacra Bros Propane and General Tank and Steel). During the years of World War II, he was in Detroit, Michigan before heading to Bartlesville, Oklahoma. However, John was able to settle for a few years in Roswell, NM, and he graduated from Roswell High School in 1950.

John, 14 years old at the time, was a newspaper delivery boy during the Roswell UFO incident of 1947, when a US surveillance balloon crashed at a ranch nearby, prompting stories and conspiracy theories about alien lifeforms and Area 51 that persist to this day, despite being debunked as Project Mogul.

Project Mogul was a highly classified project that was sending weather balloons into the ionosphere to monitor Russian nuclear activity, according to Smithsonian Magazine in an article written on the Roswell incident’s 70^th anniversary.

Article continued on Part 2 - Online subscription required