The Department of Defense (also known as the Defense Department, USDOD, DOD, DoD or the Pentagon) is the Executive Department of the Government of the United States of America charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government concerned directly with national security and the United States armed forces. The Department is also the largest employer in the world, with more than 2.13 million active duty Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and also civilian workers, and over 1.1 million National Guardsmen and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Reserves. The grand total is just over 3.2 million servicemen and servicewomen, plus the civilians who support them.

The Department – headed by the Secretary of Defense – has three subordinate military departments: the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, and the Department of the Air Force. In addition, there are many Defense Agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the Missile Defense Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), all of which are under the command of the Secretary of Defense. DoD also operates several joint services schools, including the National Defense University (NDU) and the National War College (NWC).

The following is a list of notable awards and nominations that Gerald Anderson has received.

Glenn Dennis (born circa 1925) is a founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico, which opened in September 1991, and self-professed witness to the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.

Dennis began working as a part time assistant in the Ballard Funeral Home in 1940 while still attending Roswell High School. After graduation, Dennis was excused from wartime military service because of poor hearing, and commenced an apprenticeship as an embalmer at Ballard. He graduated from the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science on 22 December 1946 and was put in charge of Ballard's military contract, which included ambulance and mortuary services for the nearby Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).

Dennis came to the attention of UFO researchers in 1989 when he called the hotline after an episode of Unsolved Mysteries featured the Roswell UFO incident. He was the first witness to place alien bodies at the Roswell base itself.

In 1991, Dennis signed an affidavit which reads in part:

1st Lt. Walter Haut ( June 2, 1922―December 15,2005) is the public information officer (PIO) at the 509th Bomb Group based in Roswell, New Mexico during 1947. Early on July 8, 1947 he was ordered by the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, to draft a press release to the public, announcing that the United States Army Air Force had recovered a crashed "flying disc" from a nearby ranch. The press release garnered widespread national and even international media attention. The U.S. Army Air Force retracted the claim later the same day, saying instead that a weather balloon had been recovered. Haut also received some criticism and ridicule in the nation's press for putting out the original press release. The series of events eventually became known as the Roswell UFO Incident.

When interviewed about the incident decades later, he claimed only a minor role, but he expressed his belief that there was "no chance" senior officers who handled the recovered material, including base commander Blanchard, mistook a weather balloon for a flying saucer.