Roswell Revisited

There are those who will tell you that the Roswell crash did not happen because pilots who were assigned to the base in July, 1947 knew nothing about it. They will suggest that if anything like that had happened, they would know about it. Kent Jeffrey, who at one time was convinced that the Roswell crash was of extraterrestrial origin, now believes that the mundane, that is a Project Mogul balloon, explains the incident and the strange debris. He believes this because many of the former pilots and officers of the 509^th Bomb Group he interviewed told him that nothing had happened.

About this, Jeffrey wrote, in an article published in The MUFON Journal in June, 1997:

The 509th Bomb Group was based at Roswell in 1947. In September 1996, I had the privilege of attending the reunion of the 509th Bomb Group in Tucson, Arizona, as a guest of General Bob Scott and his wife Terry…

At the time of the 509th reunion, I had not yet seen all the pertinent 1948 military documents and still held an inkling of hope that there might be something to the Roswell event. Prior to the reunion, I had sent out over 700 mailings to members of the reunion

group in the hope of finding additional witnesses to the mysterious debris. The result was a disappointment — only two calls, neither of which was of any real help. Both of the men who called were former 509th flight engineers. One had had a very interesting UFO sighting from the ramp at Kirtland Air Force Base. The other recalled seeing a lot of extra activity around one of the hangars at Roswell near the time of the 1947 incident.

At the reunion in Tucson, I was introduced to several of the pilots who were at Roswell in 1947 and who promptly told me, in no uncertain terms, that the crashed saucer event never occurred, period. I did not get the impression at the time, nor have I ever since, that any of these men are engaged in some kind of incredible 50-year-long massive coverup or that they were putting on an act or facade to throw me off track…

The men who were at Roswell during July 1947 feel very strongly that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened and that the whole matter is patently ridiculous… To them, the crashed-saucer nonsense, along with all the hullabaloo and conspiracy theories surrounding it, makes a mockery of and is an insult to the 509th Bomb Group and its men.

One of the 509th pilots I met at the reunion, Jack Ingham, has since become a friend and has helped me considerably in contacting additional members of the group who were stationed at Roswell during the time of the incident. When I first met Jack in Tucson, he spared no punches in letting me know exactly what he thought about the crashed-flying saucer matter. Others at the reunion told me that if something like the crash of a UFO had really happened at Roswell, Jack Ingham would have known. Jack spent a total of 16 years with the 509th Bomb Group — February 1946 to July 1962. He retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in January 1971.

I have spoken with a total of 15 B-29 pilots and 2 B-29 navigators, all of whom were stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947. Most of them heard nothing about the supposed crashed-saucer incident until years later, after all the publicity started. The few men who did recall hearing something about the incident at the time of its occurrence said that the inside word was that the debris was from a downed balloon of some kind and that there was no more than "one wheelbarrow full." Not one single man had any direct knowledge of a crashed saucer or of any kind of unusual material. Even more significantly, in all of their collective years with the 509th Bomb Group, not one of these men had ever encountered any other individual who had such knowledge.

As Jack Ingham and others pointed out, the 509th was a very close-knit group and there was no way an event as spectacular as the recovery of a crashed-alien spaceship from another world could have happened at their base without their having known about it. Despite the fact that they, individually, may not have been directly involved with the recovery operation, and despite the pervasiveness of the "need to know" philosophy in the military, these men maintained that there was absolutely no way that something of such magnitude and so earthshaking would not have been communicated among the members of the group — especially within the inner circle of the upper echelon of B-29 pilots and navigators — all of whom had top-secret security clearances…

Most of the men of the 509th Bomb Group were primarily WWII veterans in their mid- to late twenties. (Colonel Blanchard, the commander of the group, was, himself, only 31.) Military regulations notwithstanding, human nature and common sense have to be factored into the equation. Such an occurrence — the most significant and dramatic event in recorded history — would surely have been discussed by these men, at least among themselves….

This is quite dramatic testimony and on the surface, it is quite persuasive as well as devastating. It overlooks one important point and that is that Colonel Thomas DuBose, chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force, told researchers that orders had come down from Strategic Air Command headquarters, then in Washington, D.C., and specifically from Major General Clements McMullen, that the officers were not to talk about this among themselves. DuBose told researchers during a video-taped August 1990 interview, “Nobody, and I must stress this, no one was to discuss this with their wife, me with Ramey, with anyone. The matter as far as we’re concerned, it was closed as of that moment.”

That does, explain, to an extent, why Jeffrey had been unable to find pilots who remembered the event as real. No one talked about it, not only because it had been classified, but because they had been specifically ordered not to. Such an order would change the equation as described by Jeffrey.

But the question that must be asked here is “What did the members of Blanchard’s staff say?” Not the pilots and navigators of this close knit organization and not the men who thought they were connected into the closed loop at the top, but the men who ran the organization. These were the men who were on the inside with Blanchard, and if anyone knew about it, these would be the men who did.

Blanchard had a full staff running from the A-1 (or S1 in ground Army staff rosters) or personnel officer, through an A-4, or supply, an adjutant and both a deputy commander and an executive officer. The men holding these positions would work directly with the commander. They would be responsible for parts of the investigation of the alien craft, if one had fallen.

It might be important to note that, along with the primary staff, there would be others such as the provost marshal who would have some knowledge of the crash. These were also staff officers but ones whose organization would not require a daily meeting with the commander, but who would have had to be on the inside to carry out the job.

Major Jesse Marcel

When the investigation began back in 1978, when both Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield learned about Major Jesse Marcel, no one else from the 509^th had mentioned anything about the UFO crash. Marcel provided the initial information that set off the investigations and Marcel was the Intelligence Officer, the A-2, on the staff. He was in a position to know.

As we have seen, Marcel went out to the Debris Field with Sheridan Cavitt and Mack Brazel. Marcel said they arrived too late in the day to go out to the Debris Field because it would be too dark to see anything useful. Instead they spent the night in a one room building just north of the field. Marcel said they ate cold beans and Cavitt denies that he was in Roswell, or went to the field or stayed in the shack. I note this again because it provides us with a glimpse of who was saying what about the crash and who was attempting to thwart the investigation.

The next morning, according to an interview conducted by the late Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer and given to anyone who asked for a copy (such was Pratt’s generosity), Brazel prepared to led them to the Debris Field. He saddled two horses, but Marcel had never ridden a horse. Cavitt and Brazel took the horses and Marcel drove the jeep. Interestingly, it was Cavitt who gave me this little nugget of information.

From the top of a ridge line, they could see the shallow valley where the debris was scattered. Marcel told researchers that it was scattered over an area of about three-quarters of a mile long and couple of hundred feet wide. He is also quoted as saying that the debris was scattered over about a square mile. He said, “I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what I was picking up.”

Maybe I should note here, although we’ll explore it more, that the modern Air Force answer of a balloon array from the then classified Project Mogul, does not work. The size of the Debris Field is simply too large. The balloon array that will be tapped as the culprit, according to the documentation available, was not large enough, nor did it contain the right types of material, no matter what the Air Force would like us to believe today.

Marcel would describe the material as being as thin as newsprint and yet so strong that a sledgehammer couldn’t dent it. There was a thin, foil-like material that was like the foil that came in a pack of cigarettes, according to Marcel, some small Ibeams and “other stuff that looked very much like parchment that didn’t burn.”

Once he had identified the field, there was nothing more for Brazel to do, and he left the officers there. Marcel and Cavitt spent the rest of the day there examining the debris, checking for ground markings and trying to learn all they could. Remember, however, that Cavitt told Air Force investigators in the 1990s, he knew immediately what it was. He just never said anything about that to Marcel, if we are to believe him now. Rather than say it was a balloon and leave, he stayed with Marcel as Marcel attempted to identify the wreckage and spent hours on the Debris Field.

Marcel said, “We loaded up all this stuff in the carryall and we got back kind of late, but I wasn’t satisfied. I went back. I told Cavitt, you drive this vehicle back to the base [meaning the carryall] and I’ll go back out there and pick up as much as I can put in the car.”

According to what Marcel would later tell investigators, “We picked up a very minor portion of it [meaning the debris].”

With the car full and the sun setting, Marcel headed toward the base. Then, in what would become a controversial move, he drove to the house, arriving, according to his son, Jesse Jr., now a retired doctor and National Guard colonel with a tour in Iraq, about two in the morning. Marcel Sr., would later say that he was so impressed with the debris that he wanted his wife, and especially his son, to see it before he took it out of the base. He didn’t care that he had to awaken them.

Inside the house, they spread some of the debris on the kitchen floor, trying to fit pieces together as if it were some kind of gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Debris was spread from the stove on the left, across the floor to the sink and the refrigerator on the other side of the room.

Marcel, Sr. said, “I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what we were picking up. I still don’t know. As of this day I don’t know… It could not have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather balloon or experimental balloon… I’ve seen rockets… sent up at White Sands Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft, not a missile or rocket.”

Looking at the debris in the kitchen, especially the small, delicate I-beams, Viaud Marcel, Jesse’s wife noticed some sort of writing or symbols on them. Years later, Jesse Jr. would tell me that the writing was a deep purple and seemed to be embossed. One of the symbols resembled, in a very gross way, a seal balancing a ball on its nose.

When they finished looking at the debris, Marcel loaded it back into the car and drove it out to the base. He would later escort some of it to Fort Worth where he would be photographed with a weather balloon in General Ramey’s office. Marcel would later tell television reporter Johnny Mann that the debris in the picture was not the same stuff that he had found on the ranch.

Other Members of Blanchard’s Staff

But Marcel was not the only officer on Blanchard’s staff to be interviewed about the events of July, 1947. When I entered into the investigation, a surprising number of the top officers were still around. I had the chance to speak with many of them about the case, and almost all of them had some positive memories, unlike the pilots that Kent Jeffrey interviewed.

Joe Briley, who became the operations officer for the 509^th, told me that in July 1947 he was a squadron commander and he thought that Lt. Col. Hopkins was the operations officer. Sometime later they swapped jobs. Briley said that he knew very little about the crash, though he did say that Blanchard had gone out to the crash site, which, with something of this importance would be expected by the commander.

Briley also told me that he had heard the stories about the flying saucer crash, “And then the story was changed and hushed up immediately. As soon as the people from Washington arrived.” This in direct contradiction to what Jeffrey heard from all those pilots that he interviewed.

Briley also said that he and Blanchard had been close friends and that Blanchard has been his instructor pilot years earlier when he went through flight school. He added, “In retrospect, I don’t think Butch [Blanchard] was stupid enough to call a weather balloon something else.”

But that was all Briley knew. He said that Blanchard had gone out to the site and that Blanchard was too smart to get wrapped up in the weather balloon mistake. Briley provides nothing of real importance to the investigation other than to suggest that Jeffrey’s interviews with the pilots might just have missed something important.

Patrick Saunders, in July 1947, was the base adjutant and a member of the primary staff. When I first interviewed him, he was just out of the hospital after a heart attack. He joked around about the little green men and suggested that he knew nothing of real value. The impression he gave, at that time, was that this flying saucer business was a joke.

Asked if he could remember any of the rumors and which of those might have some truth to them, he said, simply, "I can't specify anything." Saunders, it seemed, was not a witness to the story, or rather, would prefer that I believed that.

But later, when both UFO Crash at Roswell and The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell were published, he bought copies. In fact, he bought lots of copies, because, according to what he wrote on the first page of The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, that was the truth.

The quotation, in his own handwriting, on the first page of that book is, "Here's the truth and I still haven't told anybody anything!"

In the months before he died, he confided in a number of close and life long friends that suddenly, the officers of the 509th Bomb Group were confronted with a technology greater than that of Earth. They, meaning the creatures in the flying saucers, had control of the sky. The Air Force was powerless against them. And they, the members of the Army Air Forces, had just seen the power of control of the sky. It was one of the factors that defeated the enemies in the Second World War.

Saunders went on, telling people that military officials had no idea about what their, the pilots of the craft, intentions might be. Their technology was more advanced than that of the United States. Top military leaders didn't know if the alien beings were a threat so the government was reluctant to release anything about them.

What's important here is that Saunders did not share this information with UFO researchers or outsiders. He kept it to himself, telling close friends and family only after the story had been told by so many others in so many other arenas. It can't be said that he was seeking fame or fortune by creating a tale to put himself in the limelight. He told only his closest friends and family.

Saunders mentioned to those same friends and family that he planned on making a video-taped statement to be released upon his death. Unfortunately he didn’t have the time to complete that tape. All that is left is the single statement he placed in the book and a few comments made to his friends and family.

Not All Are Positive, Others Are

The other senior member of Blanchard’s staff who expressed any opinion on this was Lieutenant Colonel Robert Barrowclough, who, in 1947 was the executive officer. Like the other members of Colonel Blanchard’s staff, he had served in the Second World War, eventually commanding a B-29 squadron on Tinian in the Mariannas Islands in the Pacific Theater. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal and the Asiatic and Pacific Campaign Medals.

During interviews with other members of the 509th Bomb Group, including Robert Porter, Barrowclough was identified as one of the pilots who had flown a special mission out of Roswell carrying the strange metallic debris. Porter had suggested that he had flown with Major Marcel, on the July 8 trip to Fort Worth. Porter was of the opinion that Barrowclough had been the aircraft commander on that flight. The problem here is that the records show Barrowclough was not in Roswell when the excitement began. In fact, according to the Morning Reports, documents required of every military unit that shows who is where and who is ready for duty each day, Barrowclough returned from leave on July 9. In other words, Barrowclough was not there to take the July 8 flight.

Of all the top officers at Roswell in 1947 interviewed by researchers, Barrowclough is the only one to suggest that nothing extraordinary happened. In a June 15, 1997 handwritten note to Kent Jeffrey, Barrowclough noted, “Thank you for the copy of the UFO Journal on the Roswell myth. Maybe some of those crack pots will quit calling me up and say I’m covering up a deep gov’t secret. You pretty well covered the subject.” It was signed only with his initials.

But, if we expand our investigation to the secondary staff, we can develop more information. Edwin Easley, in July 1947, was the provost marshal at the Roswell Army Air Field which meant he was responsible for security and police functions. Asked during a first conversation if he was the right man, meaning he had been the provost marshal in July 1947 at Roswell, he told me that he was. When I asked specifically about the UFO crash, he said, without hesitation, "I can't talk about it."

There are those in the UFO community today and there are skeptics who insist that Easley suggested the topic was classified because he didn't want to talk about it to me or to any others who might call. Skeptics have suggested the quickest way to get rid of UFO investigators was to say that the events were classified and couldn't be discussed. In reality, the quickest way would have been to suggest that nothing was known about the crash. If he suggested it was classified, it would have started a campaign to learn exactly what he knew that was of a classified nature.

Easley said, repeatedly during that first audio-taped telephone interview, that he had been sworn to secrecy. He couldn't talk about these events. Not that the events didn't happen, not that it was all invention, delusion and imagination, but that he was sworn to secrecy. He couldn't talk about it. He would later say that he had promised the president he wouldn’t talk about it. Here, I believe he told a representative of the president rather than speaking with Truman himself. To Easley it would have been the same thing as actually giving the president a face-to-face promise.

In a February 1991 interview Easley provided the details of the case that he could. For example, he said that Mack Brazel had been held at the guest house on the base. Mack Brazel, remember, had told friends and family that he had been in jail, put there by the military. Easley's statement seemed to corroborate that story. And, while being in the guest house is not exactly the same as being in jail, if you are not allowed to leave and there is a guard on the door, it is, basically, the same thing.

But the most important aspect of that conversation with Easley was the end of it. Here was a man who clearly knew something about the details of the Roswell case. He had been sworn to secrecy according to what he had repeatedly said himself. He didn't want to talk about it and his answers were often short and sometimes cryptic. For example, when I asked if he thought UFO researchers were following the right path, he asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “We believed the craft found was of extraterrestrial origin.”

He then said, "Let me put it this way. That's not the wrong path."

Here is a man who retired from the military as a full colonel. In 1947 he was a major and in charge of the military police at the Roswell Army Air Field. He went from Roswell to a long career in the Air Force. He certainly wasn't the type of individual to invent such a tale. In fact, had he not been sought out and interviewed, his role in the Roswell events would never have been known. He didn't come forward to find his place in the spotlight or see himself on television. Because he was so reluctant to talk, his testimony suggesting the craft was of extraterrestrial origin is extremely important.

The problem for skeptics, and frankly some of the believers, is that I didn’t get Easley on tape saying this. The situation at the time, I was at the CUFOS office and they told me to make some telephone calls while they completed their business meeting, meant I had the use of a telephone and didn’t have to pay for it. I called Easley to verify some things. It was in the course of this conversation that he verified the idea that the craft had been extraterrestrial.

Others have told me, had that happened to them, they would have gone out to buy a tape recorder and called him back. I didn’t think there was any such pressure. Easley had always been cordial with me and there was no reason to believe that I wouldn’t have a chance to talk with him again.

It was also about this time that we heard that Easley, asked by his granddaughter about the UFO crash, said very little about it. He replied to her, “Oh, the creatures.”

Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director of CUFOS, wanted to interview Easley when he went to Fort Worth later that year. I attempted to arrange it, believing that, if nothing else, Rodeghier would be able to verify Easley’s statement. Easley, unfortunately, became ill, too ill to meet with investigators. He died not long after that.

I did try to get some confirmation and did call a couple of times. Eventually I received a very nice letter from one of Easley’s daughters explaining how sick her father was and that he mother, under stress of this terminal illness had decided I was a government agent trying to “get” something on her husband. Not wanting to cause the family additional grief, I dropped the matter.

But there is some corroborative testimony for Easley. Joe Stefula, a researcher living in New Jersey tracked down another of the officers who had been assigned to the MP company at Roswell in July 1947. The man, former 1^st Lt. Chester Barton told Stefula, as he told me later, that Major Easley had told him to go out to the crash site. He said, "The military police had guards there."

Describing the site for Stefula, and later for me, Barton said that it took them about forty-five minutes to get out to the site, confirming a detail from Lewis Rickett. He said that they hit a checkpoint, confirming still another detail.

The area was filled with parts of the craft and there was a burned area. The best description that Barton could offer was that the debris looked like the remains of a crashed aircraft. He did mention that some of the military police were using Geiger counters and that they did detect some radiation in certain spots.

Barton said that there weren’t any large pieces of it and no signs of a propeller or engines. He said that it appeared as if the object had bounced two or three times before it came to rest.

When he arrived, according to what he told Stefula, there wasn’t much left to see. Just the burned areas and a lot of little junk that Barton thought would be hauled away to the junk yard.

Later, he would read about the weather balloon explanation. He said, “I remember people saying it was a weather balloon but I didn’t pay much attention to that story.”

To be fair, it must be noted that Barton said, “Based on what I saw, I still believe it was a B-29. I heard very little about the bodies. They were taken to the hospital, but I didn’t see them. I know it was a hush-hush deal and Easley told us to keep our mouth’s shut.”

Barton followed his orders and remained quiet, not even telling his wife about those events, until Stefula called him. To him it was nothing more than an aircraft accident and had nothing to do with balloons.

It should be noted here that nearly everyone who has researched the crash looked into the possibility of an aircraft accident. None of us found anything like that. The Air Force, which would have much better access to such records did the same thing with the same results. There were no aircraft accidents, not military, not civilian and not experimental that would account for the strange debris.

So Easley's testimony, corroborated by multiple sources, and especially that from February 1991, is extremely important to understanding the nature of the Roswell case. Had the object found been of mundane configuration, had it merely been an aircraft of some new design, or even a weather balloon that had been launched as part of a top secret project, Easley would have known simply because of who he was and what he did at Roswell. He wouldn't have been sworn to secrecy, and he certainly wouldn't have said that it was something extraterrestrial in origin if that hadn’t been the case.

I do fill obligated to make one additional comment here. I have said that the testimony is corroborated and that is true. Each of the things I have reported were heard by others and who verified those comments to still others. This however, is just corroboration that Easley did make the original statements and certainly does nothing to underscore the veracity of those statements. Documentation for that would be nice, but we just don’t have anything written down for us to examine.

What this really says is that the majority of the staff officers we were able to interview confirmed, as best they could, that something extraterrestrial happened at Roswell. Yes, there were those who said that nothing happened, or that they were unaware of anything extraordinary, but these minority voices would lose simply because they are in the minority.

More Flight Crew Testimony

Kent, in his article, said that he had talked to a number of pilots who were stationed in Roswell in July 1947 but who had heard nothing about the crash. To him this evidence was persuasive. There, however, reports from other pilots who did know something about the case.

As has happened so often in this story, a witness who had something important to say died before he could be interviewed on tape so we are left with the second-hand accounts of family. Such is the case of Oliver “Pappy” Henderson, who would tell close friends and his family about flying some of the wreckage on to Wright Field.

Sappho Henderson, a very nice lady, would tell researcher Len Stringfield first, and then repeat for me on video tape, about her husband’s involvement in the case. She said that they had been to the grocery store when he picked up one of the tabloid newspapers (probably the National Enquirer)and showed it to her. He told her at that time, according to what she said to me, “He said, ‘Well, I’ve been wanting to tell you this for years… I guess now it’s not top secret if they’re putting it in the paper.’ And he said the story is true.”

Although he didn’t explain to his wife how he had happen to see the bodies of the alien creatures, he did say that the drawings accompanying the article were accurate. These were drawings of small creatures with big heads and large eyes. Slender creatures that seemed to be frail.

Other than the nature of the cargo, and the events surrounding its collection, there was nothing spectacular about the flight. It was just a routine mission to Wright Field.

Later, in 1982, at a reunion of soldiers who had flown in the Second World War, Henderson told his old flight crew about the Roswell case. Stan Friedman managed to interview one of the men who told him, “It was in his hotel room that he told us the story of the UFO and about his part. All we were told by Pappy is that he flew the plane to Wright Field. He definitely mentioned the bodies, but I don’t recall any details except they were small and different…”

There were crewmen who also talked about flights out of Roswell with either the bodies or wreckage. Len Stringfield was in communication with Lloyd Thompson. He mentioned the names of the men on the crew with him and these included Robert Slusher.

Slusher told me, on video tape, that he, and his crew had been on the skeet range on orders of the squadron operations officer, Edgar Skelly, who told the aircraft commander that a special mission might be coming up. Slusher said that all of them had heard rumors that a flying saucer and bodies had been found. Once it was decided the flight would be made, the crew was sent out to pre-flight the B-29, but were rushed through it.

Slusher said that they were ordered to the pit where the bombs were normally kept where they were met by armed guards. They loaded a crate (and Slusher once gave the dimensions which would have been too large for the forward bomb bay which caused skeptics to reject his story) and took off for Fort Worth.

They never climbed above eight thousand feet, which was unusual, and when they landed in Fort Worth, they were met by six people. According to Slusher in a signed affidavit, “They took possession of the crate. The crate was loaded on a flatbed weapons carrier and hauled off… The sixth person was an undertaker who had been a classmate on our flight, Lt. Felix Martucci.”

Slusher said that on the return flight, they flew above 20,000 feet. He said, “After returning to Roswell, we realized that what was in the crate was classified. There were rumors that they [the crate] had carried debris from the crash.”

But the Roswell case is nothing if not consistent with its inconsistencies. I tried to talk to Felix Martucci, as did a number of other people. Although I reached an answering machine several times, I never spoke to him. Len Stringfield did, and Martucci hung up, saying, “No. No. No.” The next time I called, the answering machine was gone.

So Kent Jeffrey, in his search for military witnesses, had little luck at the reunions. He talked to pilots who said that nothing happened because they knew nothing about it. They believed that if something had, they would have learned about it because of contact with their friends and fellow pilots. But the truth is that highly classified events, such as these would have been, would not be discussed casually amongst the pilots and now, more than fifty years after the fact, we have found people who will talk about it.

Are the statements by Jesse Marcel, Patrick Saunders, Pappy Henderson and the others strong enough to overcome the negative statements of the men who freely admit they weren’t involved and therefore have little to contribute? That is the question that each person must answer for him or herself, but we must all remember that there are those who do talk, on a first-hand level, of their involvement in the case and they are people who are who they say they are. They were in Roswell at the right time, they have been corroborated by their fellows who were involved, and many of them were found by researchers rather than coming forward for their minutes in the spotlight. Their stories are persuasive.