Donald R. Schmitt

Donald Schmitt is an American UFO researcher who partnered with Kevin Randle in the 1980s and 1990s on what became the most exhaustive civilian investigation of the 1947 Roswell incident, tracking down and interviewing several hundred purported witnesses and military personnel connected to the case for the influential books UFO Crash at Roswell (1991) and The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994). After his collaboration with Randle ended amid disagreements, Schmitt continued Roswell research with co-author Tom Carey, producing Witness to Roswell (2007) and subsequent volumes that expanded the witness testimony archive further, though later work drew criticism, including from Randle himself, over the reliability of some newly surfaced sources and claims. Schmitt's career has been marked by both substantial contributions to the Roswell witness record — he and Randle are credited with locating dozens of firsthand and secondhand sources otherwise lost to history — and by controversy, including a widely publicized 1994 incident in which he was found to have misrepresented his professional credentials as a nurse and paramedic in unrelated contexts, a revelation that damaged his standing within the research community and prompted renewed scrutiny of his Roswell-related claims. His decades of interviews remain a heavily cited, if contested, part of the Roswell evidentiary record.