Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual

The History Channel And Roswell

The History Channel, and some UFO skeptics, have been talking about the Arthur Kent hosted special, Roswell: Final Declassification since it first aired in 2002 and has been repeated a number of times recently. They have suggested that this documentary went a long way in ending the Roswell UFO crash controversy, because, according to Kent, "The History Channel has gained exclusive access to top secret files that have been recently declassified and for the first time on television our program reveals the content of those files and the government’s own research and conclusions about the most famous UFO case of the century."

Kent continued telling the audience that "Until this day the public had been denied access to these files…" and that this would be a "look at the records generated by the researchers at the center of the story."

It would have been quite the expose if anything in that opening had been true. It was not.

The access granted to the History Channel was not exclusive and I had been working with people at the National Archives for months trying to obtain those files. Almost none of the files had ever been classified as Top Secret, and none of them had been recently declassified. The program revealed very little of what was in the files, most of which had been supplied to the Air Force in the 1990s by private UFO investigators on both sides of the controversial Roswell UFO crash question.

I suppose I should confess that I am largely responsible for this disaster of a television documentary. More than seven years ago I began a quest to get at some of the documentation created by the Air Force during their highly publicized investigation into the Roswell case. I filed a Freedom of Information request with the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force asking for that documentation.

Specifically, I asked for "all minutes, reports, memos, documents or notes relating to the investigation, discussions, or interviews conducted by the Air Force through SAF/AAZD [the specific office symbol of the staff who conducted the investigation] of the so-called Roswell Incident beginning in 1992. I am also searching for any records, memos, letters, minutes of meetings that related to the Roswell case as it was discussed in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, Shelia E. Widnall (seen here) and relating to the investigation of the Roswell case. I would like copies of the minutes of meetings and other documents between Ms. Widnall and Colonel Richard Weaver, SAF/AAZD up to and including his instructions concerning his interview with Lieutenant Colonel Sheridan Cavitt. I would like all information relating to communications among the SAF, Colonel Weaver, Captain James McAndrew and any others who participated in the research to include their instructions in the manner in which they were to conduct the investigation."

In other words, I was trying to identify the information I wanted in the most specific terms possible because I knew that those dealing with FOIA requests sometimes suggested that vague information inhibited their search. I had once asked for a specific document, giving the precise title, date of creation, and agency which had created it only to be told my information was too vague for a proper search.

The Secretary of the Air Force’s response was to tell me the official policy on UFOs and Roswell. I filed a second request, telling them that I had no interest in their official policy and had asked for nothing relating to UFOs. I wanted specific documentation concerning meetings that took place, any instructions given, memos and letters that had been written in connection with their investigation of the Roswell case.

Their second response told me that everything they had was sent to the Government Printing Office.

This I knew wasn’t true. Why would the Secretary of the Air Force send internal memos to the Government Printing Office? I went through the motions of sending a FOIA to the printing office and received a price list of their various UFO and Roswell related reports in return. I went back to the Secretary of the Air Force, with copies of the documents from the Government Printing Office proving that the information I had requested was not there. Now I was told the records I wanted had been sent to the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base.

That made some sense, and I sent off a request to the Air Force Archives. They denied they had the records. A second request was sent, this time with a copy of the latest response from the Secretary of the Air Force telling me that the records had been sent on to Maxwell. Now the officer in charge of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, (AFHRA), wrote back saying, "Unfortunately, we do not have the information you are seeking. All remaining items related to the SAF/AAZD’s investigation are in the process of being shipped to the National Archives. Although these items were held briefly in our building, they were never organized and accessioned. Therefore, they were never officially part of our holdings. You may contact the National Archives…"

Of course, I wrote to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and was told "Such records are not in the custody of Modern Military Records at the National Archives. In fact we have virtually no records of such a recent date. We suggest that you contact the Air Force Records Officer, Department of the Air Force (AFCIC)…"

We had now come full circle. I was being sent back to where I had begun the search. In four and a half years of trying to locate the material, I was right back where I had started in 1997.

I wrote to the Chief, Modern Military Records at NARA and told him that they had the records. In fact, I told him when those records had been sent and by whom, and that they should have arrived by then

On March 16, 2001, I learned that, yes, the National Archives did have the records. I was told, "In June 2000, our agency contacted the Air Force and requested that they send us the forms necessary to transfer the records in which you are interested. It appears that at some point in this process there was a breakdown, and we never received those forms. We contacted the Air Force two days ago on this transfer and requested that they forward the requisite paperwork to us. Please contact us again in two months. We hope that the records will have been received by then."

In May, two months after my last communication with anyone at NARA, I sent another request. My request was forwarded to another department because there were lots of pictures, sound recordings and video tapes in the material. At the end of June, I was told that they had eleven boxes of material and that they could fax a copy of the index of the contents. By the middle of July, I had the inventory of those boxes and had sent a request for specific documents, ignoring the video tapes because those were obviously part of the video history that the Fund for UFO Research had put together in the early 1990s. These video tapes included interviews with Glenn Dennis and Gerald Anderson. Instead, I asked for those documents and materials that, from their index listings, might prove to be of the most value to my research.

While we went back and forth, I realized that I was going to have to go to Washington and sort through the material myself. There was no way that NARA would copy everything and send it to me, and I could tell that some of the material were documents I already had found. These were some of the old reports dealing with balloon research, high altitude testing of ejection systems and parachutes, and information that I had supplied to the Air Force during their investigation. But others were just a listing, a brief title, or a suggestion of a folder that might hold something of importance. There was no way to tell from the inventory I had been sent.

Then I received a telephone call from a production company that had learned that this material had arrived at the National Archives. Apparently someone there, learning about this stuff but who had not looked at it, called the documentary company to tell them that this declassified material about Roswell was there. One of the producers called me later, telling me that they planned to investigate this newly declassified material that no one knew was there. I managed to surprise them because not only did I already know this, I even knew what the boxes contained.

What all this tells us, simply, is that the material, contrary to what the Arthur Kent’s opening remarks claimed, was not recently declassified and that it wasn’t being shown to them exclusively. Anyone who drove out to the National Archives and who had made the proper arrangements could go through the boxes. And, contrary to their claims that "Until this day the public had been denied access to these files," the material was actually out in the open.

Producers, as well as writers, must make their stories interesting, and by suggesting that the documents and video tapes had been hidden in some dark vault makes the tale better. To prove their point, they trotted out a video tape of Gerald Anderson who, as a five year old boy, claimed to have seen the remains of a crashed flying saucer and the dead, dying, and injured flight crew. The host told us that "this video tape [was] discovered among the newly declassified materials and seen on television for the first time."

In reality, the tape was made by Stan Friedman of an interview with now discredited Anderson and passed on to the Fund for UFO Research for their video history of Roswell. Not only wasn’t the tape "recently declassified," it had never been classified in the first place. And, portions of the Anderson interviews had been used in other documentaries, including Roswell Remembered produced and directed by California documentarian, Russ Estes.

The host, and the producers, introduced us to Glenn Dennis, the Roswell m (seen here) mortician, who claimed that a nurse, Naomi Self, had told him about the crash and the bodies. She supplied Dennis with a sketch of what the aliens looked like and made him promise not to tell anyone about the crash or the sketch.

Research conducted by many investigators including Vic Golubic of Arizona, failed to find a trace of a nurse by that name. Although Golubic even tried the civilian hospitals and doctors in Roswell, there had not been a nurse stationed at the base, or who lived in Roswell in 1947 by that name. She simply did not exist.

That didn’t stop the show’s producers from trotting out a record of court martial found in those eleven boxes. Although in a box by itself, and had apparently been requested by McAndrew during the Air Force search for information, it has nothing to do with Dennis’ missing nurse or the Roswell case. It should have been returned to the Judge Advocate General when McAndrew finished with it. This was not a copy, but the original document. I filed paperwork at the NARA suggesting that this record be sent back to the JAG.

The transcript was about a doctor who was having an affair with a nurse. His wife was in a mental hospital in California and it seemed as if she was going to remain there for the rest of her life. The nurse was a not very bright woman (based on the testimony in the transcript) who had met the doctor in Mississippi and later they found themselves both stationed at Roswell. They were so poor at their clandestine assignations that one week they used his car and the next hers, registering at the same El Paso (Texas) motel as husband and wife. All this happened in the mid-1950s and there is no reason to assume that it had anything to do with the Roswell case. I told the producers as much but they apparently weren’t going to let a little thing like that keep them from mentioning the court martial, the clandestine rendezvouses in Texas and the possibility that this had been the nurse identified by Dennis.

That, of course, was not the only irrelevance jammed into the program. We learned of the use of animals in space exploration, a topic that I had researched at the Space Museum in Alamogordo, New Mexico, over several months years earlier. I learned that the first use of any sort of living creatures was in July, 1947, but these were mice and insects. The first primates were used about a year later, but these were rhesus monkeys which are about the size of a house cat. The program suggested that primates in flight suits discovered on the New Mexican desert would certainly create mystery… if such a thing had ever happened but I found no records of lost flights carrying the primates, no records of civilians finding the wreckage of those non-existent flights and being mystified, and no records of lost rockets that could account for the Roswell story.

We can, if we want, pick apart the documentary. How good is it if the host mispronounces the names of key figures such as Mack Brazel and Jesse Marcel? How good is their research when they tell us about the official UFO investigation, suggesting that Project Blue Book began in 1949? The first official investigation, called Project Sign, began in 1948. Project Grudge replaced Project Sign in 1949 and Project Blue Book replaced Project Grudge in 1951, facts that made little difference to them.

I can point out that they talk about Project Mogul, the attempt to create a "constant level balloon" so that we could spy on the Soviets, but showed pictures of other balloon projects including Skyhook. They implied that these new kind of balloons made of polyethylene might have fooled some of the New Mexican ranchers because they didn’t look like regular weather balloons. The problem here is that all the polyethylene balloon launches are accounted for in the records and the only Mogul flight that is claimed to be mission that was not was made of regular weather balloons and radar targets. There was nothing unusual about them and nothing to fool ranchers who had found similar balloons on other occasions. Of course they fail to mention that this Mogul flight does not appear in the official records and Dr. Crary’s notes tell us it was canceled.

They failed to mention that Mack Brazel, the rancher who alerted the military to the debris on the ranch he managed, told reporters at the Roswell Daily Recordthat he had found weather balloons on two other occasions and the debris he found was nothing like those. If it had been Project Mogul, as the producers suggested, then what he found would have been just like those other weather balloons because that was what Mogul was.

I feel responsible for this disaster. Had I not been chasing certain records, which, by the way, were not in those boxes, then the producers would not have made this documentary. No one at the National Archives would have known that the boxes had arrived or that the proper paperwork had not been filed. Those eleven boxes would be stored in some corner of the archives because no one would care about what they contained.

The irony here is that they only contained documents created in the 1990s, or irrelevant reports from earlier Air Force experiments. While some of that is interesting, and the that research eventually allowed us to touch space and probably made air travel safer, it was not what I wanted. It was not the critical materials for which I had been searching. Now, of course, I can begin that process all over again. But this time I know what not to request. All I have to do is figure out what I need to complete my research.

Sheridan Cavitt and the Roswell UFO Case

We have seen Jesse Marcel, Sr. (seen here)beat up over the interview that he gave to Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer. We have seen every remark he made scrutinized for every nuance, every misstatement that can be turned into a lie, and every flaw in his record turned into a reason not to believe him.

On the other side of the aisle, we see Sheridan Cavitt (seen below) as the poster boy for the balloon theory. Cavitt, who made many statements about his involvement, or lack of involvement, seems to have received a pass on this. So, let’s look at the record.

My first interview with Cavitt was held on January 29,1990 while Cavitt and his wife Mary stayed in Sierra Vista, Arizona. They had rented a small apartment there to get away from the weather in Sequim, Washington where they lived the rest of the year. Cavitt was cordial but careful in what he said. He made it clear that he had not been involved in any balloon retrievals, that he had no time for that sort of nonsense, and in fact, hinted that he hadn’t even been in Roswell at the time, so it couldn’t have been him.

He did say that if he had written a report, it would have gone to Washington and not to the 8^thAir Force, parent organization of the 509^thBomb Group. This makes sense to me because Cavitt was with the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) and his chain of command ran through them and not the 509^th.

He said that witnesses who put him on the crash site were wrong and asked me why I thought they would say that. I thought at the time because he was there, but I didn’t say that to him. I would later learn that I was right about that conclusion.

During that interview, he was only nervous once and that was when we began talking about the bodies. He looked at me, leaned forward and picked up a magazine, sat back, tossed the magazine to the table and asked “Bill Rickett tell you that?”

Lewis “Bill” Rickett (seen here) was the noncommissioned officer in charge (NCOIC) of the CIC office in Roswell in July 1947. Cavitt worked closely with him.

When I said, “No,” Cavitt visibly relaxed.

I saw him again in 1993, when Don Schmitt and I visited him at his home in Washington. He told us that he had been sent to Roswell on Special Order No. 121, dated 11 June 1947. He was given a five day delay in route. He claimed not to have been physically present at Roswell in early July, 1947, so he could not have been involved in the retrieval. That, we would learn later was not accurate.

During the interview held on March 27, 1993, Cavitt again said that he had not gone out to the Brazel)Foster) ranch. We talked about that for a while and then Cavitt asked, “Are you guys convinced that I wasn’t there.”

Mary Cavitt said, “If he had been way overnight, at that time… I would for sure remember it.”

I mentioned that there were some problems with the Marcel testimony, meaning the things that Pratt had reported.

Cavitt said, “You better believe that. He [Marcel] says I was out there is his biggest problem.”

But then, as we continued to talk with Cavitt, he made it clear that he was, in fact, in Roswell at the right time. He had just arrived, or was about to arrive, depending on the date of the crash and his mood at the moment. His wife had arrived on July 2, after a wedding in Oregon and Cavitt was supposed to have arrived a day or so after that.

The last personal interview with Cavitt took place on June 25, 1994, just weeks after Colonel Richard Weaver had been there for the Air Force investigation of Roswell. We covered much of the same ground. I mention that Marcel had identified him as the one who went out to the site. That Marcel had described him as “a good west Texas boy from San Angelo.”

Cavitt said, “Sort of nails me, doesn’t it?” But he would go no further, and even though Weaver had identified him as the man who had gone out with Marcel, and that interview would be published, Cavitt still tried to make us believe that he had not participated in the event. This despite what Marcel said and what Rickett said.

What all this boils down to is that Cavitt said he wasn’t in Roswell at the time of the recovery, that he was there but that he didn’t go out, he didn’t go out with Marcel, that he was involved in no recoveries of balloon debris, he wasn’t gone overnight, and he doesn’t know why he was cast into this role.

It is, you might say, Cavitt’s word against Marcel, and if you are in the debunker camp, you naturally fall on the side of Cavitt. He was just a good officer, doing his duty, at that time the only living witness according to the story, of what happened at the Brazel (Foster) ranch. So, who do you believe?

To answer that, let’s take a look at Cavitt’s testimony to Colonel Weaver, who visited him in 1995. That interview was published in Air Force produced, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the NewMexico Desert(and we’ll see who wrote the fiction as we try to sort through all of this).

Remember that Cavitt told me, on tape and in other conversations that he had not participated in any balloon recoveries. Remember also, he was quite clear that he had not gone out with Marcel. That he wished Marcel hadn’t named him. He said, “You better believe that. He says I was out there is his biggest problem.”

Now, here is what he told Weaver. “Well, there again I couldn’t swear to the dates, but in that time, which must have been July, we heard that someone had found some debris out not to far from Roswell and it looked suspicious; it was unidentified. So, I went out and I do not recall whether Marcel went with Rickett and me; I had Rickett with me. We went out to his site. There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we

found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil, something of that type. And we gathered up some of it. I don’t know where we even tried to get all of it. It wasn’t scattered, well, what I would call, you know, extensively. Like it didn’t go along the ground and splatter off some here and some there. We gathered up some of it and took it back to the base and I remember I had turned it over to Marcel. As I say, I do not remember whether Marcel was there or not on the site. He could have been. We took it back to the intelligence room… in the CIC office.”

So, here we now have Cavitt saying that he had gone out on a balloon recovery, that he might have gone out with Marcel, but he wasn’t sure, that he was involved in the recovery in early July, and that he might have turned over some of the recovered material to Marcel.

Weaver’s next question was, “What do you think it was when you recovered it?”

“I thought it was a weather balloon.”

So Cavitt was able to identify it immediately. To me, Weaver’s next question, given the history of the case, should have been, “Did you communicate this rather important piece of information to Marcel?”

Instead, he asked, “Were you familiar with weather balloons at the time?”

And Cavitt said, “I had seen them.”

It has always been an article of faith that the Mogul balloon array was unusual enough that it could stump the people who found it. Because it wasn’t a single balloon, but many, with many radar reflectors and long strings connecting everything, people who were familiar with weather balloons might not recognize them as such, though why they wouldn’t is a mystery to me. And Cavitt claimed that he did. More importantly, he didn’t bother to tell Marcel what it was.

What we now know is that Marcel said that Cavitt had gone out there with him, but Cavitt had made it clear that he had not. We know that Marcel was right on that point, given Cavitt’s new information that Marcel might have been with him. It isn’t Marcel vs Cavitt here, but Cavitt vs Cavitt.

We can go further. Remember Cavitt said, “There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it.”

Cavitt said he was with Rickett. Here is what Rickett said about that in a taped interview conducted by Don Schmitt, “I [meaning Rickett], Marcel went back out there that same afternoon. This time they had some security people from the Provost Marshal’s office out there.”

Just so we have this straight, because it could be argued that Cavitt had not seen the security out there because it was put there after he had been in the field, Rickett said, “Cavitt and I came back together and I’m not sure if Marcel came with us… it was being protected…” So, Rickett was out there more than once, he was with Cavitt on, at least one of those trips, and Rickett saw the guards.

Later, to confirm this, Rickett said, “On the road we drove on, [there were] MP s standing there…”

The argument here is between Rickett and Cavitt. Cavitt said no guards and Rickett said guards. Others, such as Judd Roberts, William Woody and even C. Bertram Schultz said there were checkpoints along the dirt roads leading off the main highways to the north and west. This means that Cavitt was wrong on that point as well.

If we look at his description of the debris that he claimed he picked up, we find that it doesn’t match Project Mogul. There weren’t bamboo sticks in it. Balsa wood, yes. His description of the crash site matches no one else, including that supplied by Bessie Brazel, daughter of Mack, and who told investigators what she, her father and her brother Vernon, had seen. She also said that they picked up the debris so there was nothing in the field for Cavitt to see. But that is something to examine in another post.

What this means is that the testimony given by Cavitt is not very reliable. Clearly he was saying to Weaver what Weaver wanted him to say. Clearly, he was telling me things that were not consistent and that have since been proven false. He even proved to me that his statement that he wasn’t in Roswell was wrong because he showed me copies of his orders assigning him there.

This means that we must look at the statements provided by Cavitt and compare them with the statements of other witnesses. Do they fit into the picture, or it is Cavitt standing alone, making statements that are not corroborated by others. With Cavitt, even the man who worked directly under him, is contradicting him and as I noted, Cavitt doesn’t even agree with Cavitt.

While this doesn’t prove that Roswell involved extraterrestrial contact, it does show the extraordinary effort the Air Force went to in 1947 and later in 1994 to prove that it was just a weather balloon (yes, but Mogul was made up of weather balloons). And it shows that the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt, like so many others, isn’t completely reliable.

Friedman’s Black Sergeant

(Note: I asked Paolo Martinuz for permission to use the material he sent me and he granted it. The original emails were sent from Stan Friedman to Paolo.)

In February 1989, I arranged for Don Schmitt and me to meet with Bill Brazel Jr. (as seen in the picture… Randle, Brazel and Schmitt) in Carrizozo, New Mexico, to discuss his memories of picking up fragments of debris from an alien spacecraft crash. I fully expected to learn that the testimony that had been attributed to him by others to be inaccurate and nowhere nearly as spectacular as reported. To my surprise, he confirmed that he had picked up the debris, which he described in terms that suggested something other than the terrestrial, that he had kept that debris in a cigar box that suggested there wasn’t much of it and it wasn’t very large, and that, finally, Air Force officers and enlisted men from the Roswell Army Air Field eventually visited him and confiscated it.

The substance of that interview was reported first in UFO Crash at Roswell and later in The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. There is one line in that interview that sparked controversy in the early 1990s. Brazel, in describing what happened to the material, said, “I still am not really sure, but I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong. A real nice guy. Now he had a sergeant with him that was real nice. And I think there were two other enlisted men.”

Stan Friedman used the same testimony in his Crash at Corona. Though he does not provide attribution, it is clear that he is quoting from the interview that Don Schmitt and I had conducted.

Friedman wrote that Brazel said, “I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong. A real nice guy. Now he had a [black] sergeant with him that was real nice. And I think there were two other enlisted men.

Jerry Clark (seen here), writing in the International UFO Reporter, notes this change. Commenting on Crash at Corona, Clark wrote:

In other ways it [Crash at Corona] is a flawed and disturbing work, an object lesson in the consequences of uncritical claimant advocacy.

The most chilling example of this appears on page 85 [hardback] where we find these words attributed to Bill Brazel, son of Mac [sic] Brazel, the rancher who discovered the debris. Brazel reports four Air Force men called on him after learning that he had kept some of the material. One was an officer named Armstrong. “He had a [black] sergeant with him,’ the book reports, quoting Brazel. The same quote, taken from the same interview (conducted by Randle and Schmitt), appears on page 130 [paperback] of UFO Crash at Roswell, but without the bracketed word.

Brackets are placed inside quotes when a writer or editor wishes to clarify meaning or insert commentary or correction. Brackets are not supposed to be used, as they are here in the Friedman/Berliner book, to put words into someone’s mouth especially when those words state something contrary to fact. Not only has Brazel never said the sergeant was black, he emphatically denies it.

So why the adjective between brackets? The answer is simple: To make Brazel’s testimony conform to [Gerald] Anderson’s. Anderson already knew of Armstrong and the sergeant from his reading of the Roswell literature. All Anderson did was to add a detail about the sergeant’s racial identity. By dropping in a bracketed word, which not only fails to elucidate but actively misrepresents Brazel’s testimony, Crash at Coronacreates corroboration for Anderson’s story where none existed.

Why bring this up now, you might ask. It was discussed in the July/August 1992 issue of the International UFO Reporter. Simply because the issue has been raised again. Italian UFO researcher, Paolo Martinuz, who has been following the Roswell case for years and who is completing his own book about it, wrote to Friedman, asking him about the bracketed word.

According to the information I received from Martinuz, he asked Friedman (through email and seen here), “In the book “Crash at Corona” in the interview to Bill Brazel it’s quoted an important note during the talk of Brazel with Armstrong: He had a (black) sergeant with him. Why “black” is between brackets. Really Brazel said that the sergeant was “black”?

Friedman said, “He said… [it begins with an N and is a racially charged word]. I didn’t want to use the word.”

This revelation surprised me since I had conducted the interview. After the original controversy erupted, I called Bill Brazel on December 5, 1992 to ask about it, and I recorded the interview (as I had the first). I said to him, “I’ve got one quick question for you if you don’t mind…Remember when we brought Don Berliner by? He’s now saying that you said the sergeant with Captain Armstrong was black.”

Brazel said, “No. I didn’t say that. Cause it ain’t right.”

“I just wanted to clarify that situation,” I said.

“To my recollection anyway, that’s not right. I don’t think there was any colored people in the whole contingent.”

One point to note here is that Don Berliner did have an opportunity to interview Bill Brazel in person and that was why I mentioned Berliner to Brazel. But Don Schmitt and I took Berliner to meet Brazel in his home and both Schmitt and I were present at that interview. Had the word come up then, we would have heard it and I certainly would have remembered it, especially in 1992. That was the reason I called Bill Brazel, to get him on tape about the use of the word black… no where had anyone suggested anything else.

So now the question becomes, why, after all these years do we have a new reason for the bracketed word? One that we can demonstrate is inaccurate based on the original 1989 interview, and confirmed by the 1992 interview. And yes, I listened to both tapes again to be sure of these points and I will note that Brazel did use the outdated and possibly offensive “colored” but he didn’t use the more racially charged term and, in fact, I never heard him say anything like that in all my discussions with him.

I emailed Friedman about this, providing him with a copy of the original article and asking if he had a comment. He wrote back that Don Berliner remembered the incident the same way he did. I take this to mean that Berliner remembered that Brazel had used the racially charged word and they had simply substituted the more acceptable term.

So I emailed Don Berliner about this, outlining, briefly what the controversy was about, meaning the insertion of the word into the interview that Schmitt and I conducted and this new allegation that Bill Brazel had used a very derogatory term.

Berliner wrote a brief note back and said, “I have spent very little time on Roswell matters in the past 15 years, and have no clear memory of what you and Stan are discussing.”

The bottom line here is still that Brazel never used the word in my presence, never suggested that any of the soldiers who visited were black and, in fact, denied it, all on tape. I have both tapes and can prove that Brazel didn’t say it. There is no proof available that he did, and he, in fact, denies it.

I could say that we’re back to needing a reason to insert the word into the interview, but I think the reason is clear. Jerry Clark explained it. What I don’t know is why we have this latest version for doing that. Bill Brazel never said it and it should not have been included. It merely adds to the already confused picture of the Roswell case and that we don’t need.

The DuBose Affidavit

In the last few days, those on the UFO UpDates list have been talking about the affidavit made by Colonel (later brigadier general) Thomas DuBose, who had been the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force in 1947. DuBose, along with Brigadier General (later lieutenant general) Roger

Ramey were photographed with a balloon remains in Ramey’s office that was supposedly what was found at Roswell.

On September 9, 1991, when DuBose was 90, he provided an affidavit for the Fund for UFO Research. Since many have asked about it, I decided to publish it here. It says:

(1) My Name is Thomas Jefferson DuBose.

(2) My address is redacted.

(3) I retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1959 with the rank of Brigadier General.

(4) In July 1947, I was stationed at Fort Worth Army Air Field [later Carswell Air Force Base] in Fort Worth, Texas. I served as Chief of Staff to Major General (sic) Roger Ramey, Commander, Eighth Air Force. I had the rank of Colonel.

(5) In early July, I received a phone call from Gen. Clements McMullen, Deputy Commander, Strategic Air Command. He asked what we knew about the object which had been recovered outside Roswell, New Mexico, as reported by the press. I called Col. William Blanchard, Commander of the Roswell Army Air Field and directed him to send the material in a sealed container to me at Fort Worth. I so informed Gen. McMullen.

(6) After the plane from Roswell arrived with the material, I asked the Base Commander, Col. Al Clark to take possession of the material and to personally transport it in a B-26 to Gen. McMullen in Washington, D.C. I notified Gen. McMullen, and he told me he would send the material by personal courier to Benjamin Chidlaw, Commanding General of the Air Material Command at Wright Field [later Wright-Patterson AFB]. The entire operation was conducted under the strictest secrecy.

(7) The material shown in the photographs taken in Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.

(8) I have not been paid anything of value to make this statement, which is the truth to the best of my recollection.

It was signed and dated by DuBose. His signature was witnessed by three people, including a notary public which made this a sworn affidavit.

The important points here are that DuBose, in the affidavit, said that the debris in Ramey’s office was a balloon and part of a cover story and that he ordered the material sent on to Washington, D.C. for examination, rather than to Wright Field.

In other interviews, DuBose said all this took place on a Sunday, with Ramey off station. In other words, some of the debris headed to Washington before the story broke nationally on Tuesday.

While this is eyewitness testimony and there are no documents to back it up, it is important given the time frame and the use of a balloon as a cover story (seen here, in chair). Here was a man who was in the office, he was photographed in the office, and he is saying that the balloon on the floor was part of a cover story. He has just taken Project Mogul out of the explanations, but the skeptics seem unable to understand that.

BS in The Desert

Body Snatchers in the Desert by Nick Redfern — The Roswell UFO crash case has been solved — yet again. Nick Redfern (seen below), writing in his new book, Body Snatchers in the Desert has proposed a somewhat new but not extraterrestrial explanation. He suggests that what fell in Roswell was an American high altitude ex-periment that contained the deformed and mutated bodies of Japanese cap-tured at the close of the Second World War. The object that carried them was a huge balloon modeled after the balloon bombs launched during the war and a wooden flying wing type craft designed by the German Horten brothers, that was taken from the Nazis at the end of the war.

Redfern suggests that those who found the wreckage, the officers at the Roswell Army Air Field did not immediately identify the craft because of the weird construction, the aluminized rubber that made up the balloon and other elements that seemed to defy easy explanation. The craft had carried five pilots (or possibly four), all killed in the crash. As the strange contraption broke up, a segment about nine meters long, had fallen away. One of the pilots was sucked out the craft as it came apart, and this is what Mack Brazel found on the ranch he managed near Corona, New Mexico.

This experiment, designed to expose the captured Japanese to high altitude to find out what would happen to the human body, could not be exposed to the general public. At the time, July 1947, the United States was trying Nazis in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. Some of those crimes included experimentation on human subjects without their consent. Now, according to the Redfern’s theory, the United States had done the same thing. It would be the height of hypocrisy if the United States were engaged in the same sort of human experimentation.

The one thing the theory does do is explain, to some extent, the various aspects of the Roswell case. It has a nice theory for the two crash locations, it explains why the government, in this case the military, would work so hard to hide the facts even today, and it explains the small bodies claimed to have been seen by so many of the witnesses of the Roswell case.

First, I’m not sure why the Horten Brothers flying wing designs have been dredged up again. During the 1930s and the 1940s, these two German brothers worked on what was thought of as tailless aircraft. They had ten or twelve different designs, some of which crashed after only a few flying hours and others that were thought to have been scheduled for mass production but never were.

The Nazis needed a long-range bomber, one that could reach to the United States, and one or two of the Horten brother designs were supposed to have had the range. At the close of the Second World War, the Horten brothers aircraft plants were overrun by the Soviets. Nearly everything was carted back to the Soviet Union and there was speculation that the Soviets would build as many as 1800 Horten flying wings as a bomber force to counter the United States build up of long range, strategic bombers.

In the United States, there was a similar flying wing project, this one created by Jack Northrop. It began prior to the Second World War. The plan also called for the development of a long-range bomber, but other priorities and technical problems kept it from completion. After the war, a four-engine version was created which flew a number of times. In June and July 1947, these aircraft were grounded with gearbox problems, which effectively removed them as one explanation for the flying saucer reports being made.

Although the Northrop flying wing was suggested as a possible source of the Roswell debris, there was never any evidence that it was. Some believed the flying wing might have been responsible for the sighting of strange objects on June 24, 1947 by Kenneth Arnold that launched the modern UFO era. But again, the craft were grounded at the time and there were not nine of them in the arsenal. The Northrop flying wing was proven not to be responsible.

Back to the Horten brothers. One of their designs, known as the Parabola (seen here), certainly looks like the object Arnold sketched in the years after his sighting. The problem is that the first drawings Arnold made, in the days after the sighting, look little like the Parabola. And, again, there is noo evidence that any of the Horten designs were flew from the White Sands Missile Range, or that anything designed by the Hortens was built here. The Soviets got all of that when German defense collapsed in 1945.

That takes us back to the Japanese, and what were called the balloon bombs. Starting in 1944, and continuing into 1945, the Japanese launched about 9,000 of these things. It was a project that started because the Japanese had discovered the jet stream and realized that a balloon launched in Japan would reach the western hemisphere, most probably the United States in two or three days. If they put bombs on the balloons, along with some instruments, they could conceivably attack the United States.

The trick actually worked. Balloons launched in Japan, rose during the day and fell during the night. Sandbags were attached and programmed to drop if the balloon dipped too low. This way it maintained its altitude. After cycling a number of times, two or three, the bombs would fall. The Japanese knew that the odds were that the bombs would not hit a city, but did make plans to drop incendiary devices in the northwest, hoping to start forest fires.

Records indicate that about 250 balloon bombs reached the Western Hemisphere, falling as far north as Canada, as far south as Mexico City and as far east as Michigan. Any damage done was of little consequence.

The US Office of Censorship, a wartime creation, working along with the FBI, attempted to suppress the balloon bomb story during the war. They believed that Japanese spies, seeing the public information, would report home, telling of the success. That would increase the number of balloons launched.

The censorship worked well, but was changed when six people in Oregon; a woman and five children on a picnic were killed when a bomb detonated. They had found one of the balloons, lying in the forest and pulled on it causing one of the bombs to explode. At that point a "whispering" campaign began to alert the population about the bombs.

While the ingenuity of the project can’t be questioned, it is still a balloon. The technology to create the balloons wasn’t special, and in fact, wasn’t all that advanced. These were, after all, balloons. It means, there is no reason to suspect that Japanese balloon technology was married with Horten flying wing technology to create some sort of hybrid balloons toting aircraft which carried the deformed, captured Japanese two years after the war had ended.

This wasn’t the first time that such a theory had been suggested at least in general terms. Back in the early 1990s, as I began my research into the Roswell crash, I interviewed a man who worked with NASA at the White Sands Missile Range. Gerald Brown suggested that experiments using the A-9, which is a two stage, modified V-2 rocket, might have been responsible for the debris found by Mack Brazel. He believed that Duraluminum might explain the lightweight, thin metal that had been described by Roswell Army Air Field intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, Sr.

In fact, Brown had an explanation for everything found on the ranch with the exception of the bodies. He did speculate, suggesting that some kind of flying wing, this one designed by Northrop, had crashed while carrying five chimpanzees dressed in silver flying suits. Since the experiment related to the space race, and since launch operations at White Sands had been closed down because of an accident in May 1947, those involved hid their mistake. They feared for their jobs. All this was laid out in UFO Crash at Roswell on pages 168 to 170.

The problem here was, again, no flying wing was missing from the inventories, there was no record of such a launch at White Sands, though the records did exist for the period, and there were no reports that animals had been killed in the tests. A year later, as experiments were designed to test the rigors of launch physics and the dangers of upper atmosphere flight were made, animals were launched. Those records also exist.

What this tells us here is that rumors and stories of experiments preexisted the revelations of Redfern. In fact, I had told many people that if I could find evidence of an experiment, preferably illegal, which had resulted in the deaths of human subjects, that would be a much bigger story, at least in terms of what the journalistic community was willing to believe. Too many reject the idea of an alien spacecraft crash out of hand. But discover, and prove, some sort of underhanded experiment by the government and nearly everyone would jump on board.

The problem for me was the lack of anything substantial. The records that I had examined at White Sands, in Alamogordo, at the National Archives, at the Southwest History Museum in Roswell, at the universities and government offices in Albuquerque and Santa Fe revealed nothing to lead in that direction.

Then there was the debris described by the witnesses including Jesse Marcel, Sr.; Bill Brazel, son of Mack; Loretta Proctor, and Sallye Tadolini, whose mother, Marian Strickland, had been a neighbor of the Brazels in the summer of 1947. If we stuck to these descriptions, then a terrestrially manufactured machine, even an experimental craft, seems less likely.

In an interview conducted in February 1989, Bill Brazel told me about the exotic debris he had found on the ranch. He said, "The only reason I noticed the foil was that I picked this stuff up and put it in my chaps pocket. I had it in there, two, three days and when I took it out and put it in the box I happened to notice that it started unfolding and flattened out… I would crease it and lay it down and watch it.”

He also described a small piece of debris as light as balsa wood but that was incredibly strong. He said, "The piece I found was a jagged piece." He said that he tried to whittle on it, but couldn’t even get a sliver, suggesting something much tougher than anything used in a balloon.

He mentioned something like fiber optics. He said, "Now there’s this plastic they put a light down one end and it transfers the light down that thing and come out the end."

None of the items, as he described them, other than the fiber optics, appears in today’s world. It is as if we haven’t figured out the secrets of them.

He did say that his father, Mack, had told him, "That looks like some of the contraption I found." That statement, of course, connected the strange debris, which didn’t resemble either a weather balloon or the pieces of a Horton brothers flying wing, ties the strange material found by Bill to the descriptions of the others such as Jesse Marcel.

Sallye Strickland Tadolini was a young girl in 1947. Bill Brazel, about a decade older, showed up at the Strickland New Mexican ranch house a few days after the crash. He had the strange foil with him and let the others have a look at it and play with it.

Tadolini, in an affidavit for the Fund for UFO Research described it this way. "What Bill showed us was a piece of what I still think of as fabric. It was something like aluminum foil, something like satin, something like well-tanned leather in its toughness, yet it was not precisely like any one of those materials. While I do not recall this with certainty, I think the fabric measured about four by eight or ten inches. … Bill passed it around and we all felt of it. I did a lot of sewing, so the feel of it made a great impression on me. It felt like no fabric I have ever touched before or since. It was very silky or satiny, with the same texture on both sides. Yet when I crumpled it in my hands, thefeel was like that you notice when you crumple a leather glove in your hand. When it was released, it sprang back into its original shape, quickly flattening out with no wrinkles. I did this several times, as did the others."

The others told similar stories of the material. Loretta Procter said they tried to burn a small piece,about the size of a pencil and failed. Jesse Marcel, Sr. said they hit a larger, metallic piece with a sledgehammer without doing any damage or marking the metal.

What this really means is that there is a body of first hand testimony that suggests the debris found near Roswell was something extraordinary. The elements, the foil that would return to its original shape without sign of a wrinkle or crease, the extraordinarily tough metal that was as light as balsa but so strong that it wouldn’t cut or break like ordinary metals, and some something that sounded suspiciously like fiber optics at a time when no such thing existed on Earth, all suggested something extraterrestrial.

Redfern’s theory hinges on the integrity of his anonymous, but alleged first-hand witnesses. Once, five or six years ago there were a number to stories told by alleged first-hand witnesses about themselves, what they had seen, and about alien bodies. Frank Kaufmann talked in detail about these things, as did Gerald Anderson, Jim Ragsdale and Glenn Dennis. Kaufmann offered copies of official documents to prove who he was. He had a letter that if authenticated, proved Roswell has been a spaceship crash.

Redfern, in an interview conducted for UFO Review (found at http://www.uforeview.net) said that the witnesses he refused to name had proven who they were by documents in their possession. To Redfern, this is proof that they are who they claim to be and that their tales can be trusted.

Yet the same can be said of Kaufmann. His documents looked authentic, and were, after a fashion. Only after the originals were found, could we see the alterations he had made to the copies he had given us. He’d used whiteout and a copy machine to forge documents to support his claims. It should be noted that unless the original document is available for scrutiny, documents are of little value. As Frank Kaufmann said, "The Xerox is as loose as a goose." He meant that it was simple to forge documents in the modern age.

Interestingly, in Redfern’s book, he uses some of the Kaufmann testimony to bolster his case, seemingly unaware that Kaufmann invented his role in Roswell. If Kaufmann made up everything and had no role in the Roswell case, then where does that leave Redfern? He used Kaufmann's description of the craft suggesting it was authentic to bolster his Horton brothers flying wing theory. Since we know that Kaufmann was inventing his tale, that testimony does nothing to support Redfern’s theory, and, in fact, detracts from it.

So, if Redfern is wrong, and this wasn’t some kind of horrendous and illegal experiment, what is the answer? It’s the same as it has been for the last two decades. It was extraterrestrial.

Redfern has even suggested that his answer makes sense because he can find no documentation to support it. He reasons, with some logic, those conducting the experiments, knowing that they were illegal, destroyed the evidence when they finished. The files were shredded, the remains of the craft were dismantled and burned and those with knowledge were cautioned to never mention it to anyone at any time.

Redfern tells us that an extraterrestrial craft would not lend itself to such a cover up. Because the biological samples, meaning the alien bodies, were unique and because the craft and its components were unique, they would be preserved so that information could be gathered from it as our technology advanced.

And, it would seem that he would be right. Logic argued in favor of his scenario. Destruction of everything related to the case if it was an illegal experiment and preservation of everything if it was extraterrestrial.

But there are other aspects of this that do take us in the direction of the extraterrestrial. First, is the credible eyewitness testimony about the surprising and the unusual characteristics of the various types of material recovered on the field northwest of Roswell. Clearly, these were things that were beyond the technology of the times and, in fact, some of them are beyond our technology today.

Second is the testimony of the witnesses who were on the scene. Jesse Marcel, Sr., said that this was something that came to Earth. It had not been made on Earth but it came to Earth. As an air intelligence officer, assigned to the base at Roswell, he was in a position to know what they might find out there, if it was Earth-based. He knew about balloons and experimental aircraft and he was convinced that the components he found were none of those things.

Third is the testimony of Major Edwin Easley, the provost marshal at the base. In a conversation held about a year before his death, Easley told me that he believed the craft to be extraterrestrial.

Now, before we get off on a tangent, let me put this into perspective. I had asked him if we were following the right path. He wanted to know what I meant by that, and I said that we thought it was extraterrestrial. He said, "Let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path."

Convoluted, and maybe a little confusing, but he, as a participant in the recovery, was telling me that the object that crashed was extraterrestrial. He confirmed that to family and friends in the weeks before he died.

And Patrick Saunders, who had been on Blanchard’s primary staff in July 1947, also confirmed the extraterrestrial nature of the crash. Although he was always reluctant to talk about his involvement in the retrieval operation with UFO investigators, he did buy copies of UFO Crash at Roswell. He sent them to friends and family who asked him questions about the crash. On the flyleaf he wrote, “This is the truth and I never told anybody anything.

To me it simply meant that the story as outlined on that page, meaning the UFO crash and retrieval, was accurate. It meant that Saunders, based on who he was, had put into writing his opinion.

And, what all the evidence means, when it is all taken together, is that Roswell was not some rogue experiment using deformed and mutated captured Japanese, but was the crash of an alien spacecraft because, when you get to the bottom line, those who were there would have recognized everything as terrestrial if that’s what it was. That is the logical conclusion. Not that they were somehow fooled by the Horten brothers flying wing, a modified Japanese balloon bomb or the deformed bodies of captured Japanese. The only answer that takes all the evidence into account is that this was truly something from another world.

Roswell — The People Bessie Brazel

The skeptics believe they have a slam dunk on the Roswell, coming at us with information that simply is not proven as we look at it. Much of it is single witness and contradicts that given by many others. One of the best examples of this is the testimony provided by Bessie Brazel, who seems to be a very nice woman but who stands nearly alone in her testimony.

In the early 1990s, the Fund for UFO Research, FUFOR, initiated a program to gather testimony and affidavits from Roswell witnesses. Naturally, one of those was Bessie Brazel. In her affidavit, she said:

William W. “Mack” Brazel was my father. In 1947, when I was 14, he was the manager of the Foster Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, near Corona. Our family had a home in Tularosa, when my mother, my younger brother Vernon, and I lived during the school year. The three of us spent the summers on the Foster place with dad.

In July 1947, right around the Fourth, did found a lot of debris scattered over a pasture some distance from the house we lived in on the ranch. None of us was riding with him when he found the material, and I do not remember anyone else being with him. He told us about it when he came in at the end of the day.

Dad was concerned because the debris was near a surfacewater stock tank. He thought having it blowing around would scare the sheep and they would not water. So, a day or two later, he, Vernon and I went to the site to pick up the material. We went on horseback and took several feed sacks to collect the debris. I do not recall just how far the site was from the house, but the ride out there took some time.

There as a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seems to me now to have about the size of a football field [or about an acre]. There may have been additional material spread out more widely by the wind, which was blowing quite strongly.

The debris looked like pieces of a large balloon which had burst. The pieces were small, the largest were small, the largest I remember measuring about the same as the diameter of a basketball. Most of it was a kind of double-sided material, foillike on one side and rubber-like on the other. Both sides were grayish silver in color, the foil more silvery than the rubber. Sticks, like kite sticks, were three inches wide and had flowerlike designs on it. The “flowers” were faint, a variety of pastel colors, and reminded me of Japanese paintings in which the flowers are not all connected. I do not recall any other types of material or markings, nor do I remember seeing gouges in the ground or any other signs that anything may have hit the ground hard.

The foil-rubber material could not be torn like ordinary aluminum foil can be torn. I do not recall anything else about the strength or other properties of what we picked up.

We spent several hours collecting the debris and putting it in sacks. I believe we filled about three sacks, and we took them back to the ranch house. We speculated a bit about what the material could be. I remember dad saying “Oh, it’s just a bunch of garbage.”

Soon after, dad went to Roswell to order winter feed. It was on this trip that he told the sheriff what he had found. I think we all went into two with him, but I am not certain about this, as he made two or three trips to Roswell about that time, and we did not go on all of them. (In those days, it was an all-day trip, leaving very early in the morning and returning after dark.) I am quite sure that it was no more than a day trip, and I do not remember dad taking any overnight or longer trips away from the ranch around that time.

Within a day or two, several military people came to the ranch. There may have been as many as 15 of them. One or two officers spoke with dad and mom, while the rest of us waited. No one spoke with Vernon and me. Since I seem to recall that the military were on the ranch most of a day, they may have gone out to where we picked up the material. I am not sure about this, one way or the other, but I do remember they took the sacks of debris with them.

Although it is certainly possible, I do not recall anyone finding any more of the material later. Dad’s comment on the whole business was, “They made one hell of a hullabaloo out of nothing.”

Since she gave that affidavit, she has been interviewed by others. The story told to them is substantially the same as that in the affidavit, though, when interviewed by John Kirby and Don Mitchell told them, “I wasn’t terribly excited or interested in it [the debris recovery] when it happened and I haven’t really gotten any more interested in it.”

She did said that her father had found the debris sometime before July 4 and that she, her father and her brother Vernon, collected it. She said, “We had three or four sacks… we stuffed the sacks and tied [them] to the saddle… Dad just stuck it [the sacks of debris] under the steps.”

It was the following week that her father took the debris into Roswell. She confirmed to Kirby and Newman that she, her mother and brother had gone with him. While he was in the sheriff’s office, they were in a nearby park. She said, “He was there quite a while because it was late afternoon or early evening when we started back to the ranch.”

According to her, when they returned, they were not followed by any military vehicles. That means that the testimony of Jesse Marcel was in error. It also means that Sheridan Cavitt and his testimony is in error, if we accept that of Bessie.

She said, “They didn’t go with us. They came up, I don’t know, if it was the next day or a couple of days later.”

She also said that they had cleaned the field and picked up all the debris. She said that they had it all. There was nothing for Marcel or Cavitt to see when they went to the field. In fact, in talking with ranchers in the area about this debris, whether from a Mogul balloon array or an alien spacecraft, I learned that they would not allow this sort of thing to remain out there. The animals had a habit of eating things like that as part of their grazing and if the animals eat it, it would make them sick. Brazel would clean it up as quickly as possible.

If we believe Bessie, then her father (seen here) did not clean it up right away, but did within a couple of days. Yet, we know that when Marcel arrived, there was a large field filled with debris. And, if we want to reject the testimony of Marcel, there is Cavitt. While his description of the debris field suggests it was smaller than that suggested by Marcel, he still said there was debris out there for them to find and for him to identify as the remains of a balloon.

So, Bessie’s story is contradicted by both Marcel and Cavitt, one who thought it was a spacecraft and one who said it was a balloon. It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you come down on, there is testimony to contradict what Bessie remembers. She is stand alone on this.

Bessie also said that her father didn’t return to Roswell a day or so later and there is nothing in her affidavit to suggest otherwise. She added, telling Kirby and Newman that if he had gone to Roswell and didn’t return for three or four days, there would have been hell to pay. There was no reason for him to return to Roswell after they all had gone there earlier in the week.

But once again, there is evidence that such is not the case. First, and probably best, is the article that appeared in the Roswell Daily Recordon July 9. Mack Brazel was photographed while there. He gave an interview to two AP reporters at the newspaper office in Roswell who had been ordered there from Albuquerque. Clearly, he returned to Roswell at some point. Bessie’s memory of the events is wrong about his not returning.

Major Edwin Easley (seen here) was the provost marshal in Roswell in 1947. He told me that Mack Brazel had been held in the guest house for several days. Brazel said he was in jail and I suppose that if you’re not allowed to leave without escort, and that the doors are locked, then being in the guest house is about the same thing.

Bill Brazel, Bessie’s older brother told me that he saw an article about his father in one of the Albuquerque newspapers and realized that his father needed help. When Bill (Brazel, seen here) arrived at the ranch, his father was not there and didn’t return for three or four days. In fact, according to Bill, there was no one at the ranch at that time.

Neighbors like Marian Strickland told me that Mack had complained to her about being held in jail. Although she didn’t see Mack until after the events, she did say that he sat in her kitchen complaining about being held in Roswell. While there is some second-hand aspect in this, Strickland was telling me that Mack complained to her and her husband that he had been held in Roswell.

Walt Whitmore, Jr., son of the KGFL radio’s majority owner, told me that he had run into Brazel early in the morning after Brazel spent the night at his father’s house. This was before Brazel was taken out to the base. Whitmore claims that Brazel told him about the debris an Whitmore said that he then drove out there to see the field. He claimed to have picked up some of the debris, which he said was part of a balloon. He kept it for years, he said, but when the time came to produce it, he could not.

Here’s another important point. Bessie said that she recognized the material as a balloon. So, we have a 14-year-old girl who knows a balloon when she sees one, but the air intelligence officer, not to mention several others, are incapable of this. If the material was so readily identifiable to some, especially civilians, why were so many in the military fooled? And why the high powered effort to recover it, if it was only a balloon?

What this means, simply, is that there are a number of witnesses and a newspaper articles that shows that Mack was in Roswell overnight. It means that Bessie’s memories of July 1947 agree with nothing else. It means that when all the evidence is aligned against a specific claim, we must reject the claim.

I’m sure that Bessie was trying to help and I’m equally sure that she is mistaken about these events. There are too many facts and too many witnesses who contradict her story. It is possible that she is right and everyone else is wrong, but it’s not very likely.

In fact, in the months before her death, she suggested that what she hd remembered had nothing to do with the UFO crash, but was, in fact, from another time. She believed that she had been mistaken. Her testimony about the events, which had been judged unlikely during the investigation, are now something to be studied and examined, but in the light of all that she said.

Boldra and Kromschroeder

According to the information that I have, Major Ellis Boldra, an engineer stationed at Roswell after the UFO crash, discovered samples of the debris in a safe in the engineering office in 1952. In the course of his experiments with it, he tried to burn and melt part of it with an acetylene torch but it only got warm and didn’t glow. He tried to cut it with a variety of tools but failed. He described it to others as being extremely thin and when crumpled, it would quicky return to its original shape. One of Boldra’s friends said that it wasn’t any kind of metal that he could identify.

Dr. John Kromschroeder told me in an interview in interviews conducted in July and August 1990 that he had gotten the sample from Pappy Henderson and that Henderson had gotten it from Boldra. Kromschroeder said that this sample was gray and resembled aluminum foil but was harder and stiffer. He couldn’t bend it but had to be careful because the edges were sharp. He said that it didn’t seem to have a crystalline structure based on the fracturing of it. It hadn’t been torn. He also said that when properly engergized, it produced a “perfect” illumination.

Pflock seeks to discredit Kromschroeder by suggesting that he had an interest in UFOs and in the Billy Meier contact. This is guilt by association. Now we have Henderson, who, according to Pflock is a great practical joker inventing the story of the metal and finding something that Kromschroeder would not be able to identify. It is all a great joke, according to Pflock.

But he fails to report that Sappho Henderson said, of her husband, that when someone like him tells you that he’s seen the bodies of an alien flight crew and that he flew parts of the wreckage to Wright Field, you believe him. Certainly not the picture that Pflock paints of his reliability.

So, what we have here is the story, given to Pflock that Henderson liked to play practical jokes and information from a dubious source of an interview given by an associate of Henderson that suggested he had a piece of a V-2 that he used to show people telling them it was from a flying saucer.

All this and remember that Pflock told me, and others, that his first past at having Roswell in Perspective published was rejected because it wasn’t skeptical enough. Pflock then set out to get this more skeptical information. He did this by innuendo, guilt by association, and using the information developed by a man who has proven time and again that his information is not reliable.

This is all I have on Kromschroeder and Boldra. While Kromschroeder is first hand, meaning he told it to me, Boldra is, at best, second hand, coming from Kromschroeder.

CPT Lorenso Kent and the Roswell UFO Crash

Cruising through the blogsosphere the other day I found Paul Kimball’s comments about Captain Lorenzo Kent Kimball (no relation) and how some of us, Stan Friedman and me to be specific, have ignored his testimony. Well, we didn’t really ignore it, we knew about it, but thought that it added little to our understanding of the Roswell UFO case.

Kimball (the captain and not the blogger) was indeed assigned to the base hospital in Roswell as a Medical Supply Officer. That put him into the base hospital and he should have been aware of any unusual activity there in 1947 because he would have been in the center of it. Or so he would have us believe.

Instead, he wrote, “Most of the medical staff spent their time at the Officer’s Club swimming pool every afternoon after duty hours. The biggest excitement was the cut-throat hearts game in the BOQ and an intense bingo, bango bungo golf game at the local nine hole golf course for a nickel a point!! There was absolutely NO unusual activity on the Base…”

He also presents some facts about what Don Schmitt and I wrote about the crash, the alleged autopsy in the base hospital, and Jesse Johnson who was assigned as one of the doctors in

1947. Kimball wrote:

1. There was a physician named Jesse B. Johnson assigned to the Base Hospital. However, he was a 1^stLt., not a Major, and he was a radiologist, not a pathologist. He had no training as a pathologist and would have been the last member of the medical staff to have performed any autopsy on a human much less an alien. He is identified as a 1^st Lt. in the 509^th Yearbook.

2. After I learned of these assertions, I called Doctor Jack Comstock, who, as a Major, was the Hospital Commander in 1947, and in 1995 was living in retirement in Boulder, Colorado. I asked him if he recalled any such events occurring in July of 1947 and he said absolutely not. When I told him that Jesse B. was supposed to have conducted a preliminary autopsy on alien bodies, he had a hard time stopping laughing — his response was: PREPOSTEROUS!!

Kimball also takes us, meaning Schmitt and me, and Stan Friedman and Don Berliner, to task for identifying a two story brick building as the base hospital. Well, according to Glenn Dennis it was, and according to documentation, it was. The problem is that it was not built until after 1947, and that might give us a clue about what Kimball could have seen. In 1947, the base hospital was made up of a number of different, one story buildings clustered together in an nice neat, military formation. In other words, you could work in one building and not know what was happening in the others. That we all got this wrong is true, but it’s not as if we invented the information for the sake of the story.

And, here’s a bit of a problem for Kimball. In 1947, Jack Comstock was not the hospital commander. He was just one of the doctors. In 1947, the hospital commander was Lieutenant Colonel Harold Warne. A minor point I grant you, but, with Kimball writing the things he has, it would have been nice had he been right about this.

But let’s talk about Jesse Johnson. Here, I’m going to run into a little it of a problem and it’s going to seem as if I’m trying to shift blame, but I am tired of taking flack for mistakes that others made.

I will point out here that Schmitt, because of his claimed background as a medical illustrator did the background check on Johnson because it seemed a natural. He would know where to go and he supplied the information that we originally published about Johnson. Later, after I had found that some of the things Schmitt had reported were less than accurate, I decided to look the stuff up myself.

I learned, during 1947, 1^stLT. Jesse Johnson was assigned to the base hospital at the Roswell Army Air Field. There is no evidence that he played any role in the alleged autopsies of alien beings found near there in July 1947, though his name has been connected to it.

Information published suggested that Johnson, a pathologist in 1947, was called upon to perform, or assist in the performance of preliminary autopsies conducted at the base hospital. That information was based on two flawed tales. One of them was by Glenn Dennis, who claimed that he had known a nurse assigned to the base in 1947 and she told him about the autopsies.

The other assumption was that in 1947, Johnson was a pathologist. Using the source that Schmitt had used, The ABMS Compendium of Medical Specialists, I learned that in 1947, Johnson had just completed his medical training. He had no training as a pathologist in 1947 so there was no reason to suspect that he would have been brought in to assist in the autopsies.

In fact, the information available suggests that Johnson did, eventually train as a pathologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston from 1948 to 1949. In other words, he did not have the training in 1947 but completed it after his military service. That he began the training so soon after his military service suggests an interest in it, but certainly doesn’t translate into participation in any alien autopsies.

An interview conducted with his wife in the early 1990s revealed nothing to suggest that Johnson was ever involved in the recovery of alien bodies, or the autopsy of them. She had no knowledge of any connection between her husband and the U.S. government. The fact he had once trained as a pathologist seems to have confused the issue. Dr. Johnson died in 1988.

Finally, Kimball wrote, “I got to know General Blanchard very well as an officer under his command at Roswell AAF and with the 7^thAir Division. He was, as his record surely reflects, an outstanding officer, who was highly respected. According to Lt. Haut’s testimony about the event, Colonel Blanchard ordered him to issue a press release announcing that a “flying disk” have (sic) been recovered. While I am sure this is how Lt. Haut remembers it, I would argue that this [is] not the action that a responsible commander would have taken given the importance of such a discovery…”

Say what he will, the truth of the matter is that a news release was prepared and issued and in the absence of evidence to the contrary it must be concluded that Blanchard ordered it. There is no indication that Haut was reprimanded for the release, which certainly would have happened had he issued the release on his own. Kimball is speculating here with no foundation.

Kimball raised some good points but his conclusion that nothing happened because he saw nothing and no one he talked to had seen anything is flawed. Kimball’s attitude and his arrogance comes through in his writing. His information needs to be balanced against that from so many others who say differently.

And a final point to be made was that Kimball, while assigned to the hospital was not a doctor himself. He was a medical supply officer. His expertise in ordering equipment might be sought by the doctors and nurses, but in the matter of an alien autopsy and highly classified medical matters, he would be out of the loop.

Dr. Russell VernonClark and the Roswell UFO

Ten years ago, on the anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash, the talk of the festival (when not consumed with the nonsense spouted by Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso) was a piece of metallic debris that had been subjected to chemical analysis and testing by a credentialed scientist. This debris, if it could be linked to the Roswell UFO crash, and we were assured that the chain of custody existed to do that, and if the analysis was accurate, would provide proof that the UFO was an extraterrestrial craft. There was no longer any reason for speculation.

Dr. Russell VernonClark (yes, the last name is spelled that way, run together) was hustled into Roswell for his morning presentation to a packed auditorium that was also well attended by members of the media. If what had been analyzed was an actual artifact from another world, as VernonClark said, then this was big news. Certainly the biggest in the last thousand years.

VernonClark, in his presentation said, “The atomic mass so differs from that found in known earthly elements, that it is impossible for it to be from Earth.”

That would mean, of course, that it was of extraterrestrial manufacture. It would mean that an alien race had visited Earth and the evidence they left behind was now in the hands of investigators and scientists. VernonClark did not equivocate. He was definite about the meaning of his findings.

VernonClark was talking of the isotopic ratios that were not found naturally in Earth-based elements. It meant that the isotopes had to come from an outside source and that meant someone had brought them here from another world or so he concluded.

VernonClark, escorted into Roswell by UFO researcher Derrell Simms (seen here), having made his announcement, then fled from the auditorium. Some say they ran out the back door to a waiting car to get them out of town. At that point VernonClark was no longer available for questions.

Paul Davids (seen here), the executive producer of the ShowTime original movie, Roswell, took the stage to provide additional information about the artifact, but did not fulfill the promise to produce the chain of custody. Although the artifact supposedly was offered by a relative of the man who picked it up on the crash site, no name was given, no affidavit presented, and no way of checking the accuracy of the information about the discovery of the artifact was provided. In other words, we were required to take the information on faith and wait for further announcements.

There was no back up for the testing presented, although it was alleged that such additional and independent testing had taken place. Davids said it had been done but wouldn’t say by whom. He said, “This is so controversial that men’s reputations have been ruined over their seriously making conclusions.”

A nice way to dodge the question and not provide the confirming evidence. Unfortunately, there is also a ring of truth in it. Credentialed people who have come out supporting an aspect of the UFO phenomena have found themselves on the short side of the debate. Dr. James MacDonald and his trouble springs to mind here.

Paul said that he wouldn’t explain who had the artifact, nor would he say how he could be sure that the artifact came from Roswell, though such a promise had been made. All he would say was that someone had given the artifact to Simms.

So it boils down to the testing of the artifact and what could be learned from it. Even if the debris hadn’t come from the Roswell UFO crash, the artifact itself seemed to scream extraterrestrial manufacture and that would still be big news even if it couldn’t be linked to the Roswell case. VernonClark had made it clear that his research had shown the artifact to be alien.

Other scientists, when contacted by reporters, said that the isotopic ratios described by VernonClark, while not natural, could easily be produced in an university laboratory. In other words, the artifact didn’t necessarily have to be alien.

In an article published by the Albuquerque Journal, reporter John Fleck quoted a number of scientists who disagreed with VernonClark’s conclusions. One of them, a University of Kentucky chemist Rob Toreki said, “You can do it here.”

He meant that you could manipulate the isotopic ratios. And VernonClark eventually said the same thing. In a telephone conversation with me, he said it could be done so that the isotopic ratios, while not naturally occurring, could be produced in a lab. He added that it was an expensive proposition.

Other scientists suggested there were huge mistakes made in the original testing. They pointed out that one of the elements, Germanium-75, a radioactive isotope has a very short half-life and would decay into other elements in less than a day.

So where are we on this? First, there is no chain of custody that leads us to the Roswell crash site and therefore there is no provenance. We can’t say with any degree of certainty that the material came from the Roswell crash and without that we are left with an interesting anomaly that might not be connected to the Roswell case at all.

Second, the analysis seems to be flawed. The suggestion that the isotopic ratios are not naturally occurring leads to the conclusion that this artifact was manufactured but not to the extraterrestrial. Chemists and scientists say that all this can be created in a lab, and while a few suggest it would be expensive and difficult, others say that it is not. More importantly we then have VernonClark who tells us that he might have overstated the case and the it was possible to construct the material on Earth, effectively wiping away the extraterrestrial and extraordinary in this case.

And finally, and possibly most importantly, there is no follow up on this. I was in the auditorium when VernonClark made his announcement and I saw the reporters reactions. They were very interested, especially when they were promised the information to confirm the chain of custody and the results of additional, independent testing.

But that didn’t happen and I saw their reaction to that as well. If you are going to make an extraordinary claim, then you had better be prepared to provide the confirming evidence. And when you withhold that and other scientists do not agree with the conclusions you put forward, then you have lost your audience. Yes, they were very interested until they could not corroborate anything about the artifact.

The real proof here is that there has been no follow up. If this artifact was as extraordinary as claimed, then some of those dozens of reporters would have been following up on it. Even if the chain of custody couldn’t establish it as a piece of material from the Roswell UFO crash, it would still be an alien artifact and that would be a worldwide sensation.

When that last conclusion faded, the reporters lost interest. In the ten years to follow, there has been nothing more about this. No reports from other labs. No reports from the person who picked up the debris or the family or friends to establish the chain of custody and no new reports about the alien properties of the metal. It has become nothing more than an interesting footnote to the Roswell case and that’s it.

Frankie Rowe and the Roswell Fireman

I grow tired of having to repeat the same information over and over because the skeptics and the debunkers simply don’t want to hear it. Now I’m back defending Frankie Rowe (seen here) who has been called a liar for no reason that I can understand. She might be mistaken. She might be wrong. But she is relating the information to us as best she can.

Recently, on a skeptics forum, someone wrote about Rowe asking if it wasn’t true that it had been proven that her father had not been with the Roswell Fire Department. No, it’s not true and unless you can source your information, just keep it to yourself. This is just like the news media saying, “According to published reports,” without saying where those reports were published.

I can say that according to published reports, Bill Clinton, while president, had meetings with alien creatures. Of course the report was published in the Weekly World News which was making it up, but it was a published report. Saying the source is a published report tells us nothing about the veracity of that report, but hey, it sounds good.

Had the skeptic wanted to know the truth rather than just hurl an accusation, he, or she, could have called the Roswell Fire Department and asked them. Or called the Roswell Library and have them look it up in the Roswell City Directory of 1947.

I have a copy of that Roswell City Directory and it lists Dan Dwyer, Frankie’s father, as a lieutenant in the fire department and I have copies of the fire logs from June and July 1947 and find his name in there frequently. There is no question that Dan Dwyer was a member of the Roswell Fire Department in July 1947. On one page, we see that Dan was the officer in charge six times. On another page from late May through June 24, we see Dwyer or Dan as the officer in charge ten times.

But we can take this further right now. Skeptics have complained that Frankie’s story is stand alone, meaning that no one has corroborated it. Well, her sister, Helen Cahill, did tell me that she had heard the story of the crash and the threats made against her in the early 1960s. The story was not as robust as that told by Frankie and can be explained by the simple fact that in 1947 Helen was already married and living away from home.

Cahill also said that sometime in 1948, during a visit with her parents, her father (Dwyer) told her that something important had happened, but he couldn’t tell her because he was concerned about the safety of the family. Her mother, Minnie, said that Cahill’s father could tell her about it, but he was afraid that something would happen to her, Cahill, if he did. And yes, I have the signed, notarized statements in my files.

But now the story takes another turn. Karl Pflock rejected Rowe’s story because he’d talked to three former fire fighters who claimed no knowledge of these events and that the Roswell Fire Department didn’t make runs outside the city limits in 1947. He knew this because Max Littell, who had been a member of the city counsel in the early 1950s told him so.

On June 21, 1947, according to the fire log, Pumper No. 4 made a run “out side city limit.”

So, it is quite clear that Frankie’s father, Dan Dwyer was a lieutenant in the Roswell Fire Department as the documentation shows. It is quite clear that the fire department did make runs outside the city limits. Maybe the next time the skeptics will take a moment, use the Internet and find out if the allegations are warranted.

Now, let’s talk about the new corroboration for Frankie… Tony Bragalia and I have been in contact with a former member of the Roswell Fire Department (and no, I’m not going to publish his name but if Christopher Allen would like it, I’ll email it to him for verification purposes — he is very old, a bit cranky and doesn’t need several dozen telephone calls). This man was interviewed by Pflock and Pflock cited him as saying the Roswell Fire Department didn’t make a run outside the city to the crash site.

For Pflock, this disproved Frankie’s story. And the man told us the same thing. The fire department didn’t make a run to the crash site. But then the retired fire fighter said something else. He told us that a colonel had come out from the base and told them not to go out there. That they, the military, would handle it.

I believe that Karl Pflock was an intellectually honest researcher who would have reported everything he learned rather than leaving out a critical piece of information like this, if he heard it. Once he was told that the fire department hadn’t made the run outside the city and that there was no documentation for the run, he stopped asking questions. He had what he wanted.

But I asked the retired fire fighter if he knew Dwyer and learned that he did (another corroboration for Frankie Rowe). I asked about Dwyer making a run outside the city and that was when I learned of the “colonel” who had advised against it. I was told that they didn’t make the run.

And then I was told that Dwyer, in his personal car did drive out to the crash site. Dwyer and not the fire department, which explains why there is no record of it and why other fire fighters didn’t remember it.

The retired fire fighter was quite clear about these points. They had been visited by an officer from the base, they had been told not to go out there, and Dwyer, in his personal car, did.

Does this prove the story to be true? Of course not. But it does prove that Frankie Rowe hasn’t been lying. She was telling us exactly what her father told her, what he had told her sister and what he had told his friend in the Roswell Fire Department.

It undermines some of what Karl published in his book because we were using the same sources and it is clear to me that Karl just didn’t ask the right questions to find out what happened. He only asked those that verified what he believed and asked no others. Sometimes asking the next question reveals information that you don’t want to hear. Trial attorneys are well versed in not asking certain questions.

Oh, one final thing. I do have the interview on tape… Tape solves many problems. When someone says I misquoted him or her, I can play the tapes. When someone challenges what I have written, I can play the tapes. More than once I have proven my point with those tapes. And here I can prove that this fire fighter said to me and said to Tony, just what I said that he did.

Harry M. Cordes

There has been a great deal revealed about the Roswell case in the last few months. New witnesses, well, second-hand witnesses have been quoted extensively. Men and women who say that family members told them about the UFO crash, but who had not seen anything themselves have been located. With a second-hand witness, it is always possible that he or she miss heard or misunderstood what was being said.

But sometimes we get a hint of a first-hand witness and have those statements corroborated by a second-hand witness. Sure, this is confusing, but let’s just take a moment and examine one such case.

We know that 1^st Lt. Harry N. Cordes served with the 509^th Bomb Group in Roswell in 1947, specifically with the 393^rd Bomb Squadron. And yes, his picture is in the Yearbook that Walter Haut prepared.

According to his official Air Force biography, in 1946 General Cordes [as a lieutenant] participated in the first atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. From 1946 to 1949 he was assigned to the 509th Bombardment Group, Roswell Air Force Base, N.M., as a radar observer on a B-29 crew. His crew won the first annual SAC bombing competition in 1948. He entered pilot training in August 1949 and when he graduated in 1950 returned to the 509th Bomb Group as a pilot and was later aircraft commander of a B-50.He served in a variety of assignments after he left Roswell, and eventually, as a brigadier general assumed duties as deputy chief of staff, intelligence, at the Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), Offutt Air Force Base in April 1970. He retired on July 1, 1973 and he died on May 10, 2004.

Cordes has been reported as saying that when he was assigned to the CIA one of the first things he had done was look for the Roswell files but they were missing. It is an interesting statement, but by itself, means little, especially without some evidence.

Tony Brangalia decided to follow up on this. He located Cordes widow who told him that she was surprised that Cordes would say anything like that to anyone outside the family. But then she went on and confirmed the fact saying that he told her that he had unsuccessfully tried to find the Roswell file back in the 1950s.

According to the notes that Brangalia shared with me, as a lieutenant, Cordes admired Jesse Marcel, Sr. (who was an intelligence officer and Cordes would find himself assigned to intelligence later in his career) and said that there was no reason for him to lie about anything. She said that Glenn Dennis’ nurse had been committed to a home before she died (Hey, I’m just reporting what was said, but here is a little corroboration for the Dennis story). She said that Blanchard was “a believer and anyone in the military who wanted to stay in didn’t talk about it.”

Because she had grown up on a farm near Roswell and had worked in the First National Bank there, she knew many of the players in this story, knew some things about the case outside the military. She said that she had lived two doors down from the Wilcox family and said that they “were threatened and were afraid for their own reasons.”

Working in the bank she heard things from the ranchers and wrote, “At the bank I heard the ranchers discussing Mack Brazel and they thought his new red pickup was his payoff.”

But her story wasn’t just about what she had heard in the bank. She wrote, “My story begins the night of July 3^rdwith my family in Ruidoso where we always celebrated the 4^thand I had to close the bank and was tasked with icing the soda and beer and driving to meet them. As I made the usual rounds for ice I was told that the Air Base had bought all the ice so I went to the train station looking for dry ice but was told the AFB had wiped them out…”

She added, “Then when our family returned that week to go back to our ranch to attend to our stock we were barred from the Pine Lodge hiway by camaflogued [sic] airmen with machine guns that some fear entered the picture. Many stories at the bank from early rising ranchers about long trucks covered in canvas going to the base before dawn!!”

She said, “My husband flew 25 different planes including the U-2 and Airborne [sic] Looking Glass [which was the airborne command post during the Cold War] and said there was nothing hidden at Area-51 except planes [sorry Bob Lazar fans]. He also wondered his whole life why there was a cover-up and yes, he did tell me that he perused the files as a CIA agent but found everything empty.”

I will note here that there is nothing in Cordes official biography that suggests he was detailed to the CIA, but, by the same token, there are gaps in in that resume. However, after his completion of Command and Staff School he was assigned as an intelligence staff officer which could mean he worked with the CIA and would have had some access to their records. He wasn’t detailed to the CIA, but might have had contact with those there.

There is one other point to be made here. Kent Jeffrey, as he was conducting his Roswell research, contacted Cordes. Apparently Cordes said nothing to him about his involvement or knowledge but referred Kent to George Weinbrenner. Jeffrey wrote about this saying, “After my conversations with Klinikowsky and Vatunac, Harry Cordes, a former 509^thpilot and a retired brigadier general suggested I call a former acquaintance of his, George Weinbrenner, who had also been at the FTD [Foreign Technology Division, where Klinikowsky and Vatunac had also served]… Weinbrenner told me pretty much what I had already learned from Klinikowsky and Vatunac, but it was interesting to talk to him, nonetheless. With respect to the crashed UFO subject, he also found it humorous and stated that if something like that had happened, I would have know about it…”

But now we have evidence, from both Cordes and his widow that Cordes knew about it. So the question is, why didn’t Weinbrenner know? Could it be that Weinbrenner was keeping the secret? And why would Cordes tell Jeffrey to talk to Weinbrenner?

In the end, we have an intriguing story that begins with a quote from a former Air Force brigadier general and then we have additional information from his wife. First-hand quotes from the general, first-hand quotes and observations from the wife, and then her memories of things her husband had shared with her. Maybe not the smoking gun, but certainly interesting testimony to add to the stack.

J. Bond Johnson, the Ramey Memo and Me

In reviewing what Barry Greenwood had written about the Ramey Memo I thought about my interaction with J. Bond Johnson (seen here), the man who had taken the photographs. It started cordial enough with two long recorded telephone conversations and ended with two more that were somewhat acrimonious. All this came about because Johnson started talking to others and realized that what he originally said and originally believed was in conflict with the spotlight he wanted to draw to himself. To keep that spotlight focused on himself, he had to say things about me, and about his interactions with General Ramey that he had to know were not true.

As I have explained in the past, I learned about Johnson by accident. I was attempting to find an original copy of the picture of Warrant Officer (later major) Irving Newton that had been taken in Ramey’s office on July 8, 1947. According to that old Lookmagazine special on Flying Saucers, the picture of Irving Newton with the weather balloon was held by the Bettmann Photo Archives. They sent me two black and white Xerox copies of photographs of Roger Ramey with the balloon and target they held. The caption (cutline for those interested in precise terminology) told me that the pictures had been transmitted by INP Soundphoto at 11:59 p.m. Central Standard Time and had been taken by J. Bond Johnson. If nothing else, this confirmed Johnson’s participation. I learned that Johnson had worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegramand that the negatives should be there. Of course, they weren’t and I was directed to the University of Texas at Arlington and to their Special Collections library. And that is where I found additional pictures. None of Newton, by the way, but others of Major Jesse Marcel Sr., Brigadier General Roger Ramey and Colonel Thomas J. DuBose.

The woman who worked there at the time, which was 1989, was Betsy Hudon and she mentioned that she had been talked with a fellow who claimed to be the photographer. Given my cynical nature, I wasn’t sure I believed that, but thought I should check it out and asked who that was. She refused to give me the name, believing that it would violate his privacy. She had no problem, however, sending along a letter to him from me as a way of introducing me to him.

As a courtesy, she sent me a copy of the letter she had enclosed with mine, and on it was the name and address of the mystery photographer. So, I knew who he was though I’m sure her mistake was entirely unintentional.

In a few days I received a telephone call from J. Bond Johnson and in a taped interview, he told me what happened in General Ramey’s office. Of course I asked him if he minded if I recorded the call and he said he did not. As a note, on the second call to him, I asked him on tape if he minded and again he said that he did not. Later he would claim that I had called him cold and that I had not said anything about recording the conversations.

I will also note here that I didn’t call him cold because he had received a letter from me so he knew my interest and I got his telephone number from him. He called me so that we could talk.

Given the nature of the following events, I believe that the first and second interviews with Johnson are the closest to the real truth. I believe this because the facts, as established through other sources such as newspaper articles including one that Johnson originally claimed he had written himself, and with interviews with others who were in Ramey’s office on July 8, 1947, corroborate the facts. Later, as Johnson moved into his fantasy world, his comments were completely contradicted by other evidence.

I began the interview by asking, “ You took the pictures of Marcel and the guys with the wreckage?”

J. Bond Johnson (JBJ): I took the picture with Gen. Ramey and the wreckage. Gen. Ramey was the commander of the 20th Air Force at that time. Or maybe not the 20th, maybe the 15^th.

KDR: I think it was actually the 8th Air Force at that time.

JBJ: I think that's not right. [It was, in fact, the 8^thAir Force.] I have the information anyway. I went to Texas around Christmas just before and went down to the newspaper and they turned me over to the library and I found and went back in the microfiche. I found the pictures. Interesting. I looked for the- they had tuned the negatives from those years over to UTA [University of Texas at Arlington] where you had contacted…

KDR: I found that out as well.

JBJ: They, interestingly, they could not find the negatives that I had taken. They had disappeared which is kind of interesting. [Actually, some of the negatives are on file at the library.] But of course I got copies from the paper. It ran in both the morning and afternoon editions.

KDR: That was the Star-Telegram.

JBJ: The Star-Telegram. The interesting things that you can get into, that you may know about… oh, those pictures have been used on a couple of TV shows… One was Star Trek… no, Star…In Search ofwhich Leonard Nimoy was the host of. [Johnson's photos were not used on In Search of] And I was sitting watching the TV and it popped up and showed this picture and oh, there's my picture. That kind of thing. Then another time it was on ABC. They had done a similar sort of thing and I was going to… Alan Lansbury puts together the In Search ofand he invited me over to a party at his house and this major was going to be there, the one from Roswell.

KDR: Marcel?

JBJ: Is he the one that got the…

KDR: He was the one that went out and picked up the material…

JBJ: Marcel, yes. He has a son. I saw the son interviewed on TV recently.

KDR: Yeah, that is exactly right…

JBJ:… My interesting part of this, having taken the picture and now going back and looking at the picture because I didn't have a copy of it… is that I don't know whether the Air Force was pulling a hoax or not. It looks like a kite. There was another thing that the gal from UTA gave me… there is a negative they have of Ramey looking at this ray-wind [sic] kite or something and it was printed in the paper a couple of days earlier. [In fact, this is one of the photos Johnson took. There is no evidence that Ramey was photographed with a Rawin target device earlier in the day or at any other time.]

KDR: Marcel is ordered off Roswell and they load the material into a B-29 and flew it to Fort Worth for Ramey to look at.

JBJ: That's when I got into it because the AP picked up that they were flying it down there. And I walked into the Star-Telegram. I was primarily a reporter but I had a camera, Speed-Graphic, that I carried in my car. I worked night police. I was a back-up photographer. The city editor came over and said, 'Bond, you got your camera?" And I said yes and he said, "Get out to General Ramey's office. They've got a flying saucer and they're bringing it from Roswell." And they were flying it down there… That we saw… that they came up with this weather-balloon thing as an added… that's my feeling. I never saw the real stuff.

KDR: Okay.

JBJ: Then they came out with that story almost simultaneously [about] the weather-balloon thing… And it's interesting that if it was a ray-wind [sic]or a balloon that the commander of Roswell wouldn't have known that and that…

KDR: The intelligence officer should have known that.

JBJ: That's right but they had to get some warrant officer to chop on it at Carswell. [Technically it was the Fort Worth Army Air Field.] What I want to find now is that negative and see what that picture is that happened to be in the paper just a couple of days sooner with Ramey looking at the weather balloon. I have one identified on the caption of Ramey looking at it and it was published in theStar-Telegram. That's from the Star-Telegram file that is in Arlington [Texas].

KDR: So you've been through the files at Arlington?

JBJ: No, no. I'm just talking to the same girl.

KDR: Okay.

JBJ: She sent me the list for all Ramey's photographs at the StarTelegram. At first I didn't know how to identify them. She sent a list of all the Ramey pictures but mine was not included.

KDR: She's doing the same thing for me because I had asked her about Ramey and that stuff. I said, “How about Marcel?" And she said that the other fellow didn't know about Marcel. So I thought maybe the picture… I've got a couple of questions that I need to ask you that might help me out later on. Is there any way that you could find out who would have been at the first press conference and taken the other pictures of Marcel?

JBJ: Never heard of that. They ran in the Star-Telegram? KDR: There are pictures of Marcel…

JBJ: I didn't know about that at the time and I can't imagine that I wouldn't have.

KDR: There's a picture of him holding the wreckage. There's a picture of Marcel. [This line of questioning was based on the information that Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz had published in their book about a decade earlier. According to them, Marcel was photographed in Ramey’s office with the real debris, but we now know that those pictures are of the weather balloon and rawin target. The pictures had been cropped to give a false impression.]

JBJ: You're sure that's not Ramey.

KDR: No, it's Marcel. It's Marcel holding the wreckage. [According to Berlitz and Moore] Marcel said later that if you see the pictures of him in Ramey's office it's the real wreckage and if you see Ramey and his aide, it's the balloon. Marcel knew there were two sets of pictures. That's why I suspected there were two press conferences. One when the stuff first arrived and one…

JBJ: When I went there, there was no press conference. I just went out and Ramey was there and the stuff was scattered… spread out on the floor in his office. He had a big office as most of them do. And he went over and I posed him looking at it, squatting down, holding the stuff…

KDR: Did you only take one picture?

JBJ: I took one. I had one holder. I took… they were essentially duplicates. I took two shots. I just had one holder. That's all I had with me. [He actually had three holders and took six photos. At the time of this discussion, neither Johnson nor I realized all of this. As I continued the search, I learned the truth about the number of pictures… but in the long run, none of this about pictures and holders was of overwhelming importance.]

KDR: So you used all your film.

JBJ: That was it. I got back at the newspaper. The newspapers had gotten excited. The AP had sent over a portable wire photo transmitter and I got a call from Blackthorn or whatever or all the newsphoto people. Everybody wanted an exclusive and I'd taken two…

KDR: That's what it says. I had Betsy [Hudon of UTA] looking for the pictures as well. She's sending me the list too. I figure someone is going to go to Fort Worth to look through them to find out if the stuff is really missing. I have seen- I've got one picture and it's a very bad copy of Marcel holding the wreckage. I've seen pictures of Ramey with the stuff. Look magazine did something in 1966 and talked about this; it showed Ramey holding the stuff.

JBJ: lt might be my picture. He was squatting down and looking at it. It was on the floor in his office. There were no other reporters there. I went in and I don't remember. I think there was some aide there.

KDR: His aide was there?

A little explanation might be necessary here. At this point in the investigation, I am unsure of the sequence of events, unsure of who really knew what, and unsure of what Johnson really knows. Later, as I continued the research, I would sort all this out. I would learn about the number of pictures taken, who took them, with the exception of the one picture of Newton, and have a better idea about the exact timing of events based on newspaper articles that provided a time sequence. In this interview, I’m still trying to sort things out so some of the questions seem to be redundant or simply but they eventually lead to the proper conclusions.

And note here that Johnson has suggested that Ramey’s aide was in the office. What I didn’t know then, and don’t know now, is if Johnson meant Captain Roy Showalter, who in 1947, was Ramey’s aide, or Colonel DuBose who some believed was Ramey’s aide but who was, in fact, the Eighth Air Force Chief of Staff.

Johnson told me, “Okay. And that's all I think were there. I took the two [do I need to point out, again, that this number is incorrect?] pictures and then they said- but that time they said, oh we've found out what it is and you know, it's a weather balloon and so forth. No big deal. I didn't press it. I accepted that. I was rather naive. I accepted it.”

KDR: Everybody did.

JBJ: I had no reason to come on then and say, 'oh, you've got to be lying."

KDR: Why couldn't your intelligence officer identify this?

JBJ: See, I was not pressing him.

KDR: Okay. So you went to Ramey's office, you saw the wreckage, you took the two pictures, you talked to Ramey, he said it's a weather balloon, you went back to…

JBJ: The Star-Telegramand gave them the wet prints of the thing. They wanted them right out. I went in and developed them and gave them wet prints. And I wrote…

KDR: And you don't know of any other photographs taken at the StarTelegramof Marcel when he first got there or anything like that?

JBJ: I never have heard that mentioned.

KDR: I wonder if they got the newspaper wrong. How about the other newspapers in the area like the Dallas…

JBJ: The Fort Worth Presswas the only other one.

KDR: The Dallas Morning News… JBJ: They would not have been over there. I don't think they came. I never saw any other pictures at that time. They wouldn't have been so anxious to get mine if they had had any others. Particularly if they had some earlier. When I got back there they… there were a whole bunch of people there. We didn't normally send wire photo directly. They had… in fact they went out of Dallas. And they had to send over… any time they wanted something they'd have to send over a portable transmitter. That's what they had done just while I had gone out to…

KDR: The Dallas paper did.

JBJ: No, the AP did. Then we put it right on the air from there. Because we were late… it was late in the afternoon. On the east coast it would have been deadline time. And that's why they wanted it… for the New York papers and all. That's why they were rushing me. This is towards the end of the day.

At this point, I haven’t figured out that Johnson took two pictures of Marcel, which were then cropped so that it didn’t look like the rawin target. When you see the whole picture, it’s quite clear what it shows. When Marcel looked at those pictures later, in the company of TV reporter Johnny Mann, Marcel said that wasn’t the stuff he had taken to Fort Worth. Those were of a weather balloon… but this is a discussion for another time.

JBJ: I don't know who that would have been. Let me look at my UFO file. I have Ramey squatting down. That's July 10 and then there's a consolidated news story right by it from news dispatches. “Fireballs Dim Disc over Texas.” And then I have the other one. On Sunday, July 6, the front page of theStar-Telegram: "Sky Mystery Mounts as More Flying Discs Are Sighted All over the Country." It mentions Texas and New Mexico and Washington and Oregon. But it does say New Mexico in that article. And then on July 7, Monday, on the front page again, ‘Flying Discs Cavort All over U.S. as Mystery Continues to Mount.’ Seven-nine [July 9] is my story [emphasis added] on the front page that was in earlier that day. That's when they debunked it. Oh, [paraphrasing] object found at Roswell was stripped of is glamour as flying disc by a Fort Worth Army Air Field weather officer late Tuesday… identified as a weather balloon. Warrant Officer Irving Newton from Medford, Wisconsin, weather forecaster at the base, said the object was a raywind target used to determine the direction of wind at high altitudes. Hurried home and dug up the remnants and so forth. It had been found three weeks previously by a New Mexican rancher, W. W. Brazel on his property 85 miles northwest of Roswell and thirty miles from the nearest telephone. He had no radio and so forth.

KDR: What we've got to do is find the name of the photographer who took the picture of Marcel. From what you're saying, it wouldn't be a StarTelegrampicture. You were the only reporter, photographer, who went out there.

JBJ; Yes, right.

We finished the interview with some discussion about other crashes that have been reported, for example those at Del Rio, Texas, and Kingman, Arizona. Johnson then asked if I could send him some material and I agreed to put something together for him. Naturally there were additional questions to be asked.

On March 24, 1989, I called Johnson again in an attempt to clarify some of the questions bouncing around. At the beginning of the call, and on tape, you hear me ask if he objects to my recording the conversation and he says, “No.”

I then ask for a narration, from start to finish, of what he remembered about the trip out to Ramey’s office and what took place inside.

JBJ: Okay. My name is initial J. Bond; it's also James Bond Johnson. I'm the original. I was a reporter and backup photographer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegramin July of 1947 after having served in the Air Corps as a pilot-cadet in World War II. On Tuesday, July 8, 1947,late in the afternoon, I returned from an assignment to my office in the city room of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which was both a morning and afternoon newspaper. My city editor of the morning paper ran over and said, "Bond, have you got your camera?" I said yes, I had it in my car. I had a four byfive Speed Graphic that I had bought recently and I kept it in the car because I was working nights and police and so forth and had it at the ready. He said go out to Gen. Ramey's office and… He said they've got something there and to get a picture. I don't now recall what he called it. He said they've flown something down… I don't think he called it something… he gave it a name because I was kind of prepared for what I was going to see. He said something crashed out there or whatever and they're- we just got an alert on the AP wire… though it might have been the UPI [He means the United Press; the UPI wasn't formed until 1958.]… that the Air Force or the Air Corps as it was called then is flying it down from Roswell on orders from Gen. Ramey. It would be located in his office. It was or would be by the time I got out there.

So I drove directly to Carswell and my recollections are now I went in and I opened my carrying case with my Graphic and I had brought just one holder with me with two pieces of the four-by-five film. [In an interview on December 23, 1990, Johnson told us he had two holders and four pieces of film. Black and white of course. I posed Gen. Ramey with this debris piled in the middle of his rather large and plush office. It seemed incongruous to have this smelly garbage piled up on the floor… spread out on the floor of this rather plush, big office that was probably, oh, 16 by 20 at least.

I posed Gen. Ramey with this debris. At that time I was briefed on the idea that it was not a flying disc as first reported but in fact was a weather balloon that had crashed. [Emphasis added.] I returned to my office. I was met by a barrage of people that were unknown to me. These were people who had come over from Dallas. In those days, any time we had-we normally bused any prints that we were sending to the AP, we bused them to Dallas to be transmitted on the wire photo machines. We had a receiver but not a sender in Fort Worth in those days. And no faxes.

So Cullum Greene, who was my city editor, said "Bond, give us a wet print," which was not unusual. I normally operated on a very short time span at night or whatever… on an accident or a murder or whatever which I usually wound up taking pictures of. And, ah, he said, *Give us a wet print." So I went in. They had brought up a portable wire photo transmitter and had it set up there in the newsroom. There was some assorted people around there.

KDR: Other reporters? JBJ: No, these were technicians that had come over in the time that it had taken me to drive out to Carswell and interview Gen. Ramey, get briefed and come back to the office. They had come from Dallas and set up this wire photo machine. They were people I did not know. They were AP personnel.

KDR: Did you talk to Gen. Ramey very long?

JBJ: No. There wasn't much to say. As I remember, I probably wasn't there more than 20 minutes which was not unusual. Generals are pretty busy. You get in and I didn't have a whole lot to question him on. This was a very new thing because the very first article I saw in going back and researching it much later-the first story I found in the paper was July 6. I went in and developed those two [four] pictures and they were just identical almost. I came out with 8-by-10 wet prints and gave them to our photo people and they said thank you and by that time the telephone operator gave me a whole stack of messages that had come from all over the country. Everybody photo services like Blackthorn wanted exclusive photos and I could have retired very early. I had those two pictures so I had nothing to sell. I printed those two and that was it. The picture-it was too late in the day as I remember it. They didn't run it in the morning paper but they did run it the next afternoon and the following morning. Because the photographs I have now are-it ran on the morning of July l0 and the afternoon of July 9. It is entirely possible that I was briefed by the PIO. [Emphasis added.]

So now I have a narrative with no interruptions by me. Just Johnson telling his story from the top, explaining that it was really no big deal because Ramey knew it was a balloon. He has told me that he wrote the article that appeared in the July 9 newspaper and by one count of the whole transcript, he has repeated this seven times.

On August 4, after a couple of letters, I again spoke with Johnson for 28 minutes. Unfortunately, the tape malfunctioned so that all I have of that conversation are the notes I took. I simply wanted to go over some of the things again and check the exact sequence of events. I wasn’t concerned. All the information, with one minor exception, was on all the other tapes. Johnson said that it was late in the afternoon when he went to Ramey's office. He mentioned that he was mildly surprised that they were ready for him when he arrived. The front gate had been told he would be coming and there was a pass waiting there [He would later claim that this couldn’t be true because he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol and he had one of their stickers on his car so he had access to the base]. He was sent to Ramey's office and shown the weather balloon. He said that it smelled of burned rubber and wondered why it was so important that they would bring it up to the general's office.

Johnson said that it took him about 30 minutes to get to the office after he had been alerted. They had received a teletype (flash) message that the material from Roswell was on its way to Ramey’s office at Carswell. When he got there, the balloon was spread out on the floor, filling up one part of the room. He took his photos of it, spoke with the general, and then left.

Please note here that he said they had received a teletype message that the material was on the way to Ramey’s office and when he arrived the weather balloons were spread out on the floor. This will become important as we continue this long examination of the J. Bond Johnson episode.

But then the world shifted and Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera learned of J. Bond Johnson who they described as their new star witness. They interviewed him a number of times and now the story is different. Now, according to this version, Ramey didn’t know what it was in his office. Now Johnson believes that some of the real debris is mixed in with the balloon and rawin target debris. And now, Johnson was telling all who will listen that I have misquoted him.

In an article published in June 1990 issue of Focus, a newsletter created by Moore, Johnson saw the city editor, about 4 in the afternoon and was ordered out to the Fort Worth Army Air Field, later renamed Carswell. He said that it took him about twenty minutes to get there and since he was an officer in the CAP he only had to show his press pass to enter. He still stopped at the gate and he confirmed that he had to pick up his press pass there.

He went to Ramey’s office, which was different than his normal routine, and saw, in the middle of the room, the debris. He told Moore that there was an acrid odor of burned rubber. According to this version, Johnson asked Ramey what it was only to be told that Ramey didn’t know what the hell it was. He claimed to Moore and Shandera he hadn’t seen Marcel and because of that, the cover story was not in place at that time. Because of that, Johnson rushed back to the newspaper with his photographs.

Now Moore and Shandera claim that this new Johnson story, that is in conflict with what he had told me, “…holds up and sheds new light on the events. The photographs show the actual debris from the flying disc from Roswell.”

These conflicts aren’t over minor points in the story, but in significant details and changes nearly everything. Johnson had gone from a straightforward account to one that made him one of th few who had seen real debris. Not only that, he had photographed it and these, with a single exception, were the only photographs of that debris. In fact, Johnson would later claim that there were no other pictures of this. Only the six that he had taken. He denied that the photograph of Irving Newton showed the real stuff and that this photograph was unimportant and had not been published in newspapers of the time.

So I called Johnson because I had the tapes of our conversations and I knew what he had said then. And, I knew what he was claiming in his new story. I was interested in getting his reaction to these things. So I asked him about his quotes to me that Ramey had told him it was a weather balloon.

Johnson asked, “Why would Ramey have told me he didn't know what it was?”

KDR: I have no idea.

JBJ: It was kind of like- I don't recall the words, but when I went back they asked me, *What did he say it was?" He [Ramey] didn't have any idea.

KDR: In the story you wrote you said it was a weather balloon. JBJ: [Long pause.] Well, I didn't know that; I don't know what I wrote. Unless that was what you were just saying. [Long pause.] Because I didn't know that; I don't yet know that. And I'd have to look at one and see if it looked like it to me. I don't know what size they are…

KDR: They did this because the debris had been quoted as being torn up and wrecked. They ripped the thing apart when they brought it into Ramey's office so it grossly resembled the debris they had at Roswell.

JBJ: I remember that after I got out of the darkroom they had several messages to call people. That's what took up my time. I didn't even write an article then. But it was shortly after that that they received this cover story.

KDR: The cover story went out right away.

JBJ: They did not have it when I got back until after I had developed the pictures because then there would have been no urgency.

KDR: What you'd said to me was, "These were people who had come over from Dallas. In those days, any time we had… we normally bused any prints that we were sending to the AP, we bused them to Dallas to be transmitted on the wire photo machine. We had a receiver but not a sender in Fort Worth in those days. And no faxes."

JB,I; I would not have said bus unless that was just a slip of the tongue.

KDR: That may well be. Then it talked about they had come from Dallas and they set up the portable.

JBJ: Yes, they had come from Dallas. These were the technicians. These were people I didn't know. They were pushing me.

With that we discussed the genesis of the term flying saucer and some of the technology available during the late l94os. Johnson mentioned that the Star-Telegram did a morning radio program from the news room where the late-breaking stories were read for the listeners. But then we returned to the discussion of the factual errors that Johnson now claimed had crept into our article.

JBJ: That was [a] factual error that Ramey, you said in here [IUR], that Ramey told me that it was a weather balloon.

KDR: That's what you told me. JBJ: No. That was in error because…

KDR: That's what you told me.

JBJ: Okay. He didn't know because I remember asking him and he shrugged and he said, kinda like, “How the hell should I know?"

KDR: You told me originally that Ramey told you it was a weather balloon.

JBJ: Well, I wouldn't have because even when we got back to the office and I know he didn't say that. The facts of the other people. They were very excited and anxious to get that and get it on the air and they were, ah, to get it transmitted. That's why I had to rush it out so quickly, to give them a wet print and, ah, they were on the deadline of the East Coast with the- it was late in the day and they're three hours later [sic]. This is what I remember talking about, and they had an East Coast deadline. But they didn't at that time know, there had been no cover story. That came some time later before I left the office. I think I normally left there about seven or seven-thirty unless I went to a dinner meeting to cover that or something. Okay, because Ramey, whatever, when he explained about the weather balloon, came along after.

KDR: You said to me and I quote exactly from our March 24 interview. You said to me, "I posed General Ramey with this debris. At that time I was briefed on the idea that it was not a flying disc as first reported but in fact was a weather balloon that had crashed." That's exactly what you told me on the tape so if there is a factual error it's because I was going with what you told me.

JBJ: Okay. Well.I don't know.I didn't make a recording of it. I'd like to hear it. Ah, but, that wouldn't have figured. I wouldn't have said that.

KDR: That's exactly what you said to me.

But Johnson wasn’t finished with his additions to his story. He was invited to speak to various groups and to various venues and in each of these he had something new to add. Most of the time the details were refuted by facts such as newspaper articles or other documentation. Sometimes, however, these changes raise interesting questions.

And that leads to the point about wha this has to do with the Ramey memo. To fully understand, it was necessary to review much of this history. Now we get to the meat of the story.

In a report at www.geocities.com/Area51/Hollow/8827/partwo.html, Johnson wrote:

I was given the wire service "flash" announcement of this rapidly developing story by my city editor and I headed for the air base. Upon arrival at Ramey's office, I learned that the general was out but expected to return momentarily. The debris, transported from Roswell in a series of "meat wrapper" paper covered packages, had been deposited on the carpet in the general's office. Just one package was opened partially. Some packages, still sealed, were scattered around the office.

While Colonel DuBose went out to look for the general, I was left alone in the general's rather spacious office. This gave me an opportunity to further unpack and to "pose" some of the pieces of wreckage. I well recall how frustrated I was at the burned and smelly debris and how little opportunity this would permit for a good news photograph.

When the General entered the room I handed him the "flash" announcement printed from the news wires. He read it with interest. I then took a couple of shots of him, still wearing his hat in his office, examining the debris with the "flash" announcement held in his hand.

So now we have Johnson suggesting that he had taken the “flash” message out to Ramey’s office with him. We don’t need to infer it from other statements he made, but have those exact words.

I suppose I should point out that while Johnson was photographing the debris and Ramey, he asked Ramey what it was and again claims that Ramey said he didn’t know. He then asked DuBose to join Ramey and took two more pictures. Finally, he photographed Marcel with the stuff, so we now have a sequence in which the pictures were taken. Ramey first, then Ramey and DuBose and finally Marcel. The picture of Newton would come much later and was taken by someone else.

And, finally, the real point. If Johnson handed the “flash” message to Ramey, then we know the source and it is not the military. We know that it would contain the information that was on the news wires about the crash, which means it would mention Roswell and Fort Worth and we can see, easily, that the words weather balloons, though misspelled are on the paper.

But with this story, nothing is ever easy. Johnson claimed here that he had unwrapped some of the packages when he was left alone in Ramey’s office. If this is true, then we can deduce from this that no classified material would have been left unguarded in that office.

What do we know? Johnson did go out to the base and he did take photographs. The ones I found at Bettman Photo Archives clearly credit the photograph to J. Bond Johnson.

Johnson told me that he had written the article that appeared in the July 9 editions of the Star-Telegram, the last line of which said, “After he took a first look, Ramey declared all it was was a weather balloon.” This, of course, refutes Johnson’s later claims that Ramey said he didn’t know what it was.

Timing is everything and we have lots of documents that provide timing. One newspaper even provided a timeline of the events beginning with the 2:26 (MST) message that a flying saucer had been captured. This means, of course, that the message arrived in Fort Worth at 3:26 pm (CST). Within an hour, or about 4:20 according to the San Francisco Examiner, Ramey was already calling it a weather balloon and radar reflector.

If we retreat slightly on the timeline, and project into it. We can speculate that Johnson was handed the story about 3:30. He said at one point it took about 30 minutes to get to the base and in another story it took about 20 minutes. It is doubtful that he would have arrived at Ramey’s office much before 4:30, and if that it true, then we know that Ramey had already released the weather balloon story.

There is another point here and it explains why Johnson repudiated taking Marcel’s picture. Given the timing of the flight from Roswell to Fort Worth, not to mention the timing of getting from the flightline to Ramey’s office, Marcel couldn’t have arrived much before 5:30, though he could have gotten there closer to five. At any rate, he was there at some point while Johnson was still there, and if that is true, then Ramey had released the weather balloon story already and wouldn’t have told Johnson that he didn’t know what it was.

There is a story in the Dallas Morning News that says their reporter had talked to Major E. M. Kirton, an intelligence officer at the Eighth Air Force Headquarters, and was told that what had been found was a weather balloon. The interview took place at 5:30 p.m. which means that while Kirton is being interviewed by the Dallas newspaper, Johnson is either still in Ramey’s office or has just left.

Just after 6:00 p.m., Irving Newton receives a telephone call to get over to Ramey’s office immediately. If he doesn’t have a car, he’s to steal one. He arrived shortly after that and immediately identified the material on the floor as the debris from a rawin target. He told me that he had launched hundreds of them during the invasion of Okinawa during the Second World War.

Since Johnson didn’t see him, Johnson had to be gone by this point. The picture of Newton, with the debris, showed that it had been moved very little from the time the other pictures were taken. In other words, the debris in the pictures taken by Johnson is virtually the same as that in the picture taken of Newton.

Where does that leave us? Well, I can say that I have everything Johnson told me on tape with one exception but it is clear that in the beginning he was saying that Ramey told him it was a weather balloon. His photographs verify this claim. It was a weather balloon.

He told me, at least seven times, that he had written the July 9 article in which he wrote that Ramey said it was a weather balloon.

Although we must speculate about some items in the timeline, we have others that have fixed times based on documentation. We can say the story began at 3:26 p.m. in Fort Worth and we can say that Johnson would have arrived at Ramey’s office, probably, within the hour.

Marcel was ordered to Fort Worth in the afternoon and must have been there around 5:00 p.m. for Johnson to take pictures of him. That means that Ramey already had the cover story in place and had been telling other reporters I was a weather balloon for about an hour.

Johnson would have left Ramey’s office prior to 6:00 p.m. because he didn’t see Newton, and would have been back to the office no later than 6:30 p.m. And finally, we know that his picture was transmitted over the wire at 11:59 p.m. because we have the documentation from Bettman, though Johnson, Moore and Shandera, for some reason insist that the picture was transmitted at 7:59 p.m.

Which brings me back to the Ramey Memo. Johnson said he brought the flash message with him. He said that he handed it to Ramey and that is the document that Ramey was holding when the pictures were taken. Johnson later said that this wasn’t true. He said that he had picked up a document from Ramey’s desk and handed it to him so that he would have something in his hand.

Some have speculated that Ramey entered his office with the document in his hand and didn’t set it down. Of the three scenarios, the most likely is that Johnson brought in and handed it to Ramey and then posed him for the pictures.

Second best is that Ramey had it with him when he entered the room and just didn’t set it down. That would mean that it was a military document that probably related to the Roswell events.

That it relates to Roswell is borne out by the words that can easily be read. There is no other conclusion to be drawn here.

Least likely is that this was something on Ramey’s desk that Johnson snagged and handed it to the general.

This then, is a long look at the history around the Ramey memo and what we know about the man who took can the picture. It is clear that he changed the story repeatedly in an attempt to keep himself in the spotlight. He blamed me for misquoting him but was never able to offer any evidence this was true. Instead he ignored the tapes and transcripts I sent him, suggesting that I had somehow altered the tapes in an editing process.

Very little of the story he told to everyone else can be trusted. The parts that we can verify through other sources can be trusted. Everything else is open to speculation. You would have thought with a living witness to this aspect of the case, we’d have a better understanding of what happened in Ramey’s office. Instead we’re left with confused, contradictory claims by Johnson, and very few facts. Such is UFO research.

Jason Kellahin and the Roswell UFO Crash

Jason Kellahin was an AP reporter in the summer of 1947 based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was dispatched to Roswell to write about the flying saucer crash and I interviewed him in January, 1993 in his home in Santa Fe. The interview was videotaped.

Ten months later he was inter-viewed by researcher Karl Pflock and we see that his story changed radically from that first interview I had conducted. Pflock developed an affidavit from what Kellahin said to him and that affidavit was published in Karl’s book about Roswell.

There are two items of evidence that are important to us here. One is my video tape and the other is the Kellahin affidavit. By comparing these two items, we can learn something about the Roswell UFO case, something about half-century old memories, and how we can be pulled from away from the truth.

Of course, by adding other items of evidence, including the stories written by Kellahin in July 1947, using the time line published in newspapers about the Roswell events, and other, limited documentation, we can figure out who should be believed and who should not. In this case, the answer is surprising.

Once I arrived at Kellahin’s home, I was invited in and we walked through to his rather plush office in the back. I had the chance to observe some of his books and magazines before I set up the video camera, made sure that it was focused, and then sat down.

With the camera running, and after introducing himself to the camera, he told me that he received a call from the New York office of the Associated

Press telling him that he needed to get down to Roswell as quickly as possible. "We [Kellahin and Robin Adair, a photographer and according to Adair, reporter] were informed of the discovery down there… the bureau chief sent me and a teletype operator from the Albuquerque office."

Kellahin, said, "It must have been in the morning because we went down there in the daytime. It would take a couple of hours to get down there…" Kellahin continued, saying, "We went down to Vaughn. Just south of Vaughn is where they found the material."

The ranch, according to him, wasn't very far from the main highway (Highway 285) from Vaughn to Roswell. They turned from that highway just south of Vaughn, onto the Corona road. They were driving to the west and saw "a lot of cars and went over. We assumed that [this] was the place. There were officers from the air base. There were there before we got there."

Kellahin described for me the military cars, civilian cars and even police vehicles parked along the side of the road. In one of the fields adjacent to the road, at the far end of it, were a number of military officers, no more than five or six of them. Kellahin left his vehicle and entered the field where he saw the scattered debris.

Ten months later, in an affidavit prepared for the Fund for UFO Research, Kellahin would say, “Our first stop was the Foster ranch, where the discovery had been made. At the ranch house, we found William ‘Mac’ [sic] Brazel, his wife and his small son. It was Brazel who made the find in a pasture some distance from the house.”

He also told Karl Pflock, “Brazel took Adair and me to the pasture where he made his discovery. When we arrived, there were three or four uniformed Army officers searching some higher ground about a quarter mile to a half mile away. Apparently, they had been there for some time.”

Kellahin told me, "This man from Albuquerque with me [Adair], he had a camera. He took some pictures of the stuff lying on the ground and of the rancher who was there… Brazel was there and he [the photographer] took his picture."

Kellahin asked Brazel a few questions, interviewing him there, in the field. "I talked to him. He told me his name [Brazel] and we had been told it was on his ranch."

Kellahin didn't remember much about what Brazel had said. "About the only thing he said he walked out there and found this stuff and he told a neighbor about it and the neighbor said you ought to tell the sheriff… it was the next day [Brazel] went down to Roswell."

Standing there in the field, near the debris, Kellahin had the chance to examine it closely. "It wasn't much of anything. Just some silver colored fabric and very light wood… a light wood like you'd make a kite with… I didn't pick it up. In fact, they [the military] asked us not to pick up anything… You couldn't pick it up and have identified it. You have to have known [what it was]. But it was a balloon. It looked more like a kite than anything else."

Which, of course, is not the description of a balloon but certainly is a good description of one of the rawin radar targets. That Kellahin suggested it was bits of a balloon here makes little difference. It is quite clear what he is trying to say.

The debris covered a small area, not more than half an acre. The military men were standing close by as Kellahin interviewed Brazel but didn't try to interfere. "They weren't paying much attention. They didn't interfere with me. I went wherever I wanted to go. They didn't keep me off the place at all. Me or the photographer."

In his affidavit, he described the scene by saying, “There was quite a lot of debris on the site — pieces of silver colored fabric, perhaps aluminized clothe. Some of the pieces had sticks attached to them. I thought they might be the remains of a high-altitude balloon package, but I did not see anything, pieces of rubber or the like, that looked like it could have been part of the balloon itself. The way the material was distributed, it looked as though whatever it was from came apart as it moved through the air.”

Kellahin, in the video tapped story he gave me, said he tried to talk to the military people, but they didn't give him any information. "They were being very, very cautious because they didn't know."

He didn't have much time for the interview because the military officers came over and told him they were finished and were going to take Brazel into Roswell. With Brazel gone and the clean up of the debris finished, there wasn't much reason for the AP reporters to remain. Kellahin and Adair continued their trip to Roswell, arriving before dark.

He elaborated on this, saying in the affidavit, “After looking at the material, I walked over to the military men. They said they were from RAAF and were just looking around to see what they could find. They said they were going back to Roswell and would talk with me further there. They had a very casual attitude and did not seem at all disturbed that the press was there. They made no attempt to run us off.”

Kellahin told me, "We went down to the Roswell Daily Recordand I wrote a story and we sent it out on the AP wire… Adair developed his pictures and set up the wire photo equipment and sent it out."

To Pflock and for his affidavit, Kellahin said, “Adair and I, Brazel, and the Army men then drove down to Roswell, traveling separately. Late that afternoon or early evening, we met at the offices of the Roswell Daily Record, the city’s afternoon newspaper. The military men waited on the sidewalk out front, while I and a Record reporter named Skeritt interviewed Brazel and Adair took his picture. (Adair also took photos of Brazel and the debris at the ranch, but these were never used.) Walter E. Whitmore, owner of KGFL, one of Roswell’s two radio stations, was also present during the interview. Whitmore did his best to maneuver Brazel away from the rest of the press.”

The story ended saying, "Adair and Kellahin were ordered to Roswell for the special assignment by the headquarters bureau of AP in New York."

Kellahin, in a break with what he said in his affidavit when he left the ranch, had expected to see Brazel in Roswell, the next day, but, "I don't recall that I did. I think the military was talking to him and wouldn't let him talk to anyone else to my recollection… I saw him there but… there were some military people with him."

Following the story as far as he could, Kellahin told me he talked to Sheriff Wilcox. "When we got down there to the newspaper, he was there. I saw him there or at his office… By that time the military had gotten into it. He was being very cautious."

And in his affidavit said, “After interviewing Brazel, I spoke with the military people outside and then went over to see Sheriff George Wilcox, whom I knew well. Wilcox said the military indicated to him it would be best if he did not say anything. I then phoned in my story to the AP office in Albuquerque. The next morning, Adair transmitted his photos on the portable wirephoto equipment.”

"It was a weather balloon," said Kellahin. "In my opinion that's what it was. That's what we saw. We didn't see anything else to indicate it was anything else."

Once they finished in the office, Kellahin returned to Albuquerque and Adair was ordered to return to El Paso to finish his job there. By the time Kellahin returned to Albuquerque, there was a new story for him that had nothing to do with flying saucers. Another assignment that was just as important as his last.

There are some points that must be made. The raw testimony and the later affidavit from Kellahin must be put into context with that provided by others, including Robin Adair, who was also dispatched to Roswell. Both Kellahin and Adair were trying to answer the questions as honestly as they could, attempting to recall the situation as it was in July 1947. However, they are at odds with one another. There clearly is no way for Adair to be both in El Paso as he claimed during Don Schmitt’s interview with him and in Albuquerque as Kellahin suggested to me.

Given the circumstances, there are some things that can be established. A number of newspaper articles about the events, written in 1947, have been reviewed. Although many of them had no by-line, they did carry an AP slug and did identify the location as Roswell. Since Kellahin was the only AP reporter there, assigned by the bureau chief in Albuquerque at the request of the AP headquarters in New York, it is clear that he wrote the articles.

The first problem encountered is Kellahin's memory of getting the call early in the morning. That simply doesn't track with the evidence. Walter Haut's press release was not issued until about noon on July 8.That means there would be no reason for the AP to assign a reporter on the morning of July 8. There was no story until that afternoon. And, by the morning of July 9, the story was dead. No reason to send anyone to Roswell because photos had already been taken of the debris in Fort Worth and the information already released. Besides, the story in the July 9 issue of The Roswell Daily Record makes it clear that they, Kellahin and Adair, had already arrived in Roswell, coming down on July 8.

Second is the story that Kellahin saw the weather balloon on the Brazel ranch. His description of the location, south of Vaughn but just off the main highway to Roswell is inaccurate. The debris field, as identified by Bill Brazel and Bud Payne, is not close to the Vaughn — Roswell highway. In fact, the field where the debris was discovered is not visible from the road around it. It is a cross country drive.

Then in his affidavit, he suggests that he went to the Brazel ranch house where he interviewed Brazel. But with Brazel’s wife standing right there, he asks her no questions and offers no quotes from her in his story. That seems strange. He has what would be exclusive information from another witness, but provides no quotes from her.

More importantly, by the time Kellahin could have gotten to that field, the balloon should have been removed. In fact, according to Marcel and the newspaper articles, the balloon was already in Fort Worth if we believe what has been reported. After all, a balloon wouldn't have taken long to collect and Marcel had done that the day before.

Kellahin's testimony of seeing a balloon out in the field is intriguing, not because he is an eyewitness to the balloon on the crash site, but because of what it suggests. If there was a balloon, it would mean that the Army had to bring one in. In other words, they were salting the area, and that, in and of itself, would be important. It would suggest that the Army had something to hide, if they were planting evidence. That is, if we find Kellahin’s testimony about seeing the balloon in the field to be credible.

In his affidavit, we get the same basic story, but this time Brazel takes Kellahin and Adair out to the field. Adair, the photographer, takes pictures, but none of them are ever used. This makes no sense when it is remembered that all seven pictures of the balloon debris displayed in Ramey’s office were printed somewhere. The pictures of the balloon in the field, with Brazel, and with Army officers around it, would be more important than the pictures in Ramey’s office, or the one of Mack Brazel wearing his cowboy hat and smoking a cigar.

The best available is that Kellahin did not stop at the ranch on his way down. He is mistaken about that. The lack of the photographs, and evidence about the location of Brazel on the afternoon of July 8 suggest it. The location that Kellahin gives is in error. The ranch was not close to Vaughn, and the debris field is not close to any road.

By the time Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell and were ready to begin reporting, some of the pressure was off. Ramey, in Fort Worth, explained that the material found in Roswell was nothing extraordinary. No longer was New York demanding pictures. In fact, several pictures had already been taken in Fort Worth.

The interview with Brazel occurred on the evening of July 8, according to the newspaper article in the July 9 edition of The Roswell Daily Record.Brazel was brought into Roswell by the owner of KGFL, Walt Whitmore, Sr. and taken out to the air base, not accompanied to Roswell by the Army as Kellahin suggested much later. Brazel was then escorted to the newspaper office to be interviewed by Kellahin, as well as a reporter for the Daily Record. The pictures transmitted, those of Brazel and George Wilcox, are ones that had been taken in the office for that purpose. Kellahin wrote his story, which appeared in the newspapers the next day.

With the story dead, Kellahin was ordered to return to what he had been doing. He left Roswell. Kellahin believed that nothing extraordinary had been found and there was no reason for the events to stick in his mind.

There are a couple of other comments to be made here. First, I’m surprised that the skeptics haven’t made more of Kellahin’s testimony. It fits into their balloon theory and adds the weight of a first-hand witness.

Second, Phil Klass takes me to task for not questioning the testimony of Robin Adair with the same vigor that I addressed the Kellahin’s testimony. He is, of course, right about that. Some of his assumptions are wrong. He asks why Adair, if he was in El Paso would have been authorized to charter a plane while Kellahin had to drive. The distances are roughly equivalent. The answer could be that the drive from El Paso covers some wild territory including mountains while the drive from Albuquerque does not.

Anyway, Klass is correct and I should have been tougher on the testimony offered by Adair. Clearly both men can’t be right about the circumstances, and I now suspect that neither are.

Finally, Tim Printy makes the case that these nearly fifty-year-old memories (when the witnesses were interviewed) are probably unreliable. As I mentioned, once Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell, Ramey had already introduced the balloon explanation. The story went from one that might have been the greatest story of the last thousand years to the misidentification of a weather balloon. The story probably didn’t stick in the minds of either man until we all began asking questions about it a half century later.

So, what do we do with this? Take the testimonies, compare then with the records available and decide from there where to go. I believe, based on my observations of Kellahin, on what I saw as I walked through his house, and on the affidavit he produced, that his testimony is largely confabulation. These are the things that he thought he would have done, these are the descriptions of the debris that he remembers, though it sounds as if it was lifted from the newspaper of 1947 (which he told me he had read just prior to the interview), and these are the actions he would have taken. Unfortunately, there are just too many problems with his story.

And here I need to say that I didn’t interview Robin Adair. I worked from the notes and transcripts of the interview conducted by Don Schmitt. All this means is that I didn’t have the opportunity to study Adair the way I did Kellahin. I don’t know what sources he might have used to refresh his memory or why his testimony is so much different than that of Kellahin.

But Klass was right. I should have been more skeptical about Adair. There are questions that should have been asked that were not.

In the end, we’re left with two conflicting statements, one that bolsters the balloon theory and one that suggests the alien ship but neither of which is reliable. To learn the truth, we need to go somewhere else.

Jesse Marcel and the Roswell UFO Crash

I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Nothing in the world of UFOs is ever easy or simple. It seems that almost any question will not have an easy answer and there are times when the more complex the answer the more it seems that someone is engaging in rationalization.

Take, for example, Lance Moody’s question about Jesse Marcel and the debris in Ramey’s office. He believes that since Marcel was quoted as saying that if he is in the picture it’s the real debris, the debate is over. Clearly the photographs of Marcel in Ramey’s office show him with the remains of a rawin target and a weather balloon (as seen here). But, is it really that easy?

Of course not. First, the quote originally appeared in The Roswell Incidentby Charles Berlitz and William Moore. This book was described by Moore as a disgraceful hodgepodge of fact and fiction. Moore, himself, offered three different versions of quotes by Marcel about the debris and the pictures, each changed to reflect the latest information. I think we can safely reject the Marcel quotes in that book because we don’t know what Marcel actually said to Moore, how Moore interpreted it, and how it might have been changed as new information was discovered.

Oh, if it was only so easy. But Stan Friedman got Marcel to sit down in front of the cameras for a documentary and Marcel, in that documentary, says the same thing. If he’s in the picture, it’s the real debris. If it is anyone else, then it is not.

So, we’re back where we started and Lance’s question takes on added importance because we see Marcel making the claim. How do we answer Lance’s question?

I could argue that the material on the floor in Ramey’s office was there before Marcel arrived, if the time lines have been reconstructed properly, and if that is true, then that couldn’t be the stuff that was found in Roswell. I could argue that Ramey was telling reporters, before Marcel arrived, that it was all a weather balloon and that the stuff on the floor reflected that explanation.

Yes, I know that some of this is speculative and there will be arguments about the validity of such a claim, but we do have some very good documentation and the timing of some of these things seems to be off when corrected for time zones. All this implies that the cover story was in place before Marcel could have arrived, if the take off time as given by Robert Skirkey in Roswell is correct… and please note that I am qualifying all this because we are dealing with old memories here and we have no documentation about the take off times.

Of course, I can point out that the press release written by Walter Haut, and clearly ordered by William Blanchard, gives us a window of times. I can suggest that none of this blew up until after the press release was put onto the various wire services and there would have been no reason to order Marcel, or anyone else to Fort Worth until then, but again. It is speculation.

I could argue that Colonel Thomas DuBose (seated in chair and seen here), who was in Ramey’s office, said, on video tape and to various others including Don Ecker and Kay Palmer, that the stuff on the floor had been switched and it was not the stuff found in Roswell.

Yes, I know Jaime Shandera challenges this and he did interview DuBose, but he made neither tape recording nor took notes. We are left to accept, or reject, his version based on that, and in the face of the recordings of DuBose that do exist and can be reviewed, it seems that Shandera’s claims should be rejected.

This suggests that the pictures were staged and that the stuff that was flown in from Roswell was not the stuff on the floor. Testimony from those who were there at the time make this clear whether it was DuBose who makes the claim or Marcel… more on this later.

Irving Newton, the weather officer, told me that he had just arrived at the weather office, which was about 6 p.m., when he got a call from Ramey (or Ramey’s aide which would have been the same thing, militarily speaking) and was told to get over to the general’s office immediately. If he didn’t have a car, he was to steal one, his words, not mine. When he arrived, he was told that he was supposed to identify the stuff on the floor, but was also told that the general thought it was all part of a weather balloon. In other words, Newton (seen here) didn’t have to identify it for Ramey because he already knew and the officer talking to Newton wanted to make sure that Newton gave the right answers.

More important, we know that Newton went to work on the evening shift that began, for him, at six. But we also know, based on other documents, that Ramey was already telling people that the Roswell find was a weather balloon, and that Major Edwin Kirton was telling the Dallas Morning Newsit was a weather balloon thirty minutes or more before Newton could get to Ramey’s office, which means the identification of the balloon and rawin target had already been made.

All this is interesting and certainly argues against the material on the floor being what was found near Roswell, but we still have that statement by Marcel. This is a real problem and argues most persuasively against anything extraterrestrial being found.

There is, however, one other significant bit of information. Back in the 1980s, Johnny Mann was a reporter for a television station in New Orleans and he was going to do a series of reports on UFOs. He wanted to interview Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, which is irrelevant to us. He also interviewed Houma, Louisiana resident, Jesse Marcel, even taking him to Roswell to walk those fields again. Mann made it clear that Marcel wasn’t exactly sure where he had been and that one stretch of New Mexico desert looks like any other so Mann didn’t care. They were in the general vicinity, which was close enough for his story and for filming purposes.

Mann, of course, had a copy of The Roswell Incidentand he flipped it open to the pages showing the pictures of Jesse Marcel with the weather balloon debris. Mann showed the pictures to Marcel and said, “Jess, I gotta tell ya, that looks like a weather balloon.”

Marcel replied, “That’s not the stuff I found.”

Johnny Mann, who has no dog in this fight, who wouldn’t care what was said as long as it was the true, made it clear to me, that Marcel recognized the material in the picture as a balloon.

This exchange was overheard by the cameraman, so that it is not single witness, but can be verified. And yes, I know the skeptics will point out that this is hearsay, but I would suggest that Mann has no reason to invent this tale and it can be corroborated. And I should point out that I sought out Mann rather than he coming to me.

So, we have Marcel saying that if he is in the photographs, it is the real stuff and then looking at the two specific photographs of himself with alleged debris saying that it’s not the stuff he found. I’m not going to speculate about what this means. I will point out that it isn’t the black and white issue that Lance and others believe it to be, and it proves that nothing about this is ever simple or easy.

Call it rationalization if you want, but it is about investigation and looking at all the facts. Does this bit of information lead us to the extraterrestrial? No. But it does suggest there is more here than a Mogul balloon because the evidence and testimony isn’t explained by that either.

And it makes everyone wonder what the military was trying to hide. Mogul was all over the place in July 1947, from the discussions by the Mogul team with everyone they thought might help to pictures in the newspapers a day or two after the 509^thBomb Group told the world they had a flying saucer. Dr. Albert Crary, the leader of the balloon launch expedition even used the name Mogul in his unclassified diary and his field notes.

In this, I have not mentioned any of the other credible testimony from high-ranking officers in Roswell who almost universally suggested there was something to this crash and Mogul does not answer the question. The men who would have had to know about the crash in fact said that it happened and suggested it was extraterrestrial with one notable exception.

I have not mentioned the effort by the military and the government to convince us all that it was a weather balloon and then a Mogul balloon by citing the need for secrecy for Mogul. This simply fails because Mogul, the launches in New Mexico, the attempt to create a constant level balloon, and even the name were not classified in 1947 as so many others have claimed. The ultimate purpose, to spy on the Soviets was a secret, but that is a red herring. It means nothing here.

In the end, we do have good reason to reject the Marcel statement that only he was in the real pictures (which, by the way, is contradicted by the other five pictures of the others) and because of that, the argument is not ended. Marcel himself said the pictures to which Lance referred, and that others referred, were of a balloon and not the stuff he found. Most importantly, you don’t have to rely on my honesty, integrity, or interpretation for that because the information comes from others.

So, no, I don’t see this as a rationalization but a rejection of a statement that is challenged by much other evidence. This is what I mean when I say that nothing is easy in the world of the UFO.

Jesse Marcel, James McAndrew and Me

I recently had the chance to sit down with Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr. (Seen here holding a replica of the alien I-beam) and we had a chance to talk about many things including some new stuff about the Roswell UFO case. Well, relatively new anyway.

Back in the mid-1990s, as the Air Force claimed to be investigating the Roswell UFO crash story, one of the officers, First Lieutenant (later captain) James McAndrew, called many of the witnesses and many of the investigators to talk with them. I spoke to him on a number of occasions and the tone was normally him trying to convince me to admit that I was only in it for the money. He told me that no one would think any less of me if that was the case. People would understand the motive.

I told him that I would have conducted the investigation and written the books if there had been no money involved. This was an important story and one that needed to be told. I pointed out that I had tapes of most of my interviews and that I would give him the telephone numbers of many of the important witnesses. This was all he needed to do to verify that what I reported was what they had said.

Yes, I fully understood that having taped interviews didn’t mean that the witnesses were telling the truth, but it would prove that I had reported accurately what I had been told. And yes, we tried to verify the information which is why I didn’t report about the former Air Force pilot who had been one of the alternate pilots on Air Force One, who had flown the aircraft when President Kennedy was on board, and that he had taken the president to see the bodies.

I found the pilot and yes, he had been an Air Force officer and yes, he had flown President Kennedy on Air Force One and yes he had seen an alien creature. However, he had not flown the president to a location to see alien bodies. He had been flying a fighter when he had seen a craft off his wing and inside the domed structure he had seen a creature. So, all the elements were there, they just didn’t add up to the whole that we had been told.

What was interesting about McAndrew was that he wasn’t interested in the tapes. He didn’t want to talk to the high-ranking military officers. He was more interested in telling me that he KNEW I was in it for the money. Not the truth but his belief.

Now, over the weekend, at the MUFON conference put on by the Illinois chapter of MUFON and hosted by Sam and Julie Maranto (seen here), I spent time with Jesse Marcel. It was late on the last day when the topic of McAndrew came up at the question and answer session held by all the presenters. I mentioned that McAndrew wanted me to flip and that he wasn’t interested in the tapes and telephone numbers of some of the key witnesses. I figured the Air Force didn’t want to be in the position of calling high-ranking officers, including one brigadier general, liars at best. This whole thing might suggest that the Air Force was lead by incompetents.

Jesse mentioned that McAndrew had called him several times and always pressed him on the details, suggesting mistakes. Jesse always told me that it hadn’t been a balloon. The debris he held and the debris he saw was not part of a balloon, or a balloon structure, or a Project Mogul array. It was strange stuff that was very lightweight and very strong. He didn’t know what it was.

Jesse then said at the end of the last call, McAndrew said, “Well, Colonel, we don’t know what you saw.”

When you think about it, that’s an important statement. Here was McAndrew, trying to convince Jesse that he had seen parts of a Mogul array, trying to convince him of the new Air Force answer about the Roswell UFO crash, and finally admitting that he didn’t know what Jesse saw.

No, this doesn’t mean that McAndrew was conceding to Jesse that it was an alien spacecraft or anything else. It just means that McAndrew was admitting that he didn’t know what Jesse had seen.

I will note here that the Air Force, in their investigation, did not report on all the interviews they had conducted with the researchers, with the witnesses and with the former and retired officers. Instead they focused on the members of Project Mogul, the civilians who launched the balloons in New Mexico, and Sheridan Cavitt, the Counter-intelligence Corps officer who lied about where he was in July 1947 but told the Air Force just what they wanted to hear.

And now we learn that the chief investigator told Jesse Marcel that he didn’t know what Jesse had seen. This seems to be a curious admission for the man. A moment of honesty hidden in all that governmental deceit.

Of course I know why they worked so hard to prove that Roswell was a balloon and not an alien craft. No matter what they said today, they were going to look bad and in any case they would be painting some top officials as liars. True, the lies might have been justified because of national security considerations, but they were lies nonetheless.

We have one new bit of information that doesn’t mean all that much in the overall picture, but does provide a glimpse into the background. The man who would be pushing the Mogul answer telling a witness that, “Colonel, we don’t know what you saw.”

Melvin Brown

In the last few days, I have been involved in a couple of discussions over what has amounted to little more than semantics. People have been concerned about what some words mean and the usage of them. One way to illustrate all of this is to look at the story provided by Beverly Bean, whose father, Melvin Brown told family about his involvement in the Roswell case.

I am using the short section about the Melvin Brown (seen here) that appeared in Roswell Revisitedto help clarify this point. I believe that people reading The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell understood perfectly that we hadn’t interviewed Brown himself, but that the information came from family members we did interview. The footnotes provided the information about how we had gathered the data. In fact, it is clear from other sections of the book that the information didn’t come from Brown himself, but from his daughters and wife. Only those with half a brain didn’t get it and there are plenty of people out there like that.

Here’s where we are on this aspect of the case. I wrote in Roswell Revisitedthat Beverly Bean is a pleasant English woman, who told researchers about her father, Sergeant Melvin Brown, who had been stationed at Roswell in 1947. Unlike some of those who have told stories about Roswell, Brown is in the Yearbook (just like a high school yearbook that contains the pictures of about 80 % of everyone assigned to the base) that Walter Haut created in 1947. It is a document that allows us to verify that a soldier did, in fact, serve at Roswell during the critical period without having to gather information from the records center in St. Louis.

Like so many of the others, Brown didn’t tell his story to investigators and it didn’t surface until after Jesse Marcel began talking of the crash in 1978. Interestingly, one of the documents offered by Bean to prove her father served in Roswell was an order with several names on it including Jesse Marcel.

In a video-taped interview conducted in England by Brad Radcliff on January 4, 1991, Bean said, “Dad used to tell us this story and he didn’t tell us often.”

He told his daughter, according to what she said on tape, that he “had to go out into the desert. All available men were grabbed and they all went out into the desert in trucks where a crashed saucer had come down.”

Brown and another soldier whose name he never gave to his daughter, were pulled aside for guard duty. They were told not to look under the tarp in the truck, but Bean said, laughing, that the minute someone tells you that, the first thing you do is take a look. She said that he dad told her, “He and this other guy lifted up the tarpaulin or something…”

She said that she and her sister now argue about the number of alien creatures under the tarp. Bean says it was two, but her sister insists that it was three. No matter now. The point is that Brown described the creatures for them.

According to her, “He said they were smaller than us, not more than four foot tall… much larger heads than we have. Slanted eyes and [the skin was] yellowish.”

Bean wondered if he had been scared but he said that he wasn’t. He thought they had nice faces and they looked as if they would have been friendly. According to Bean, he repeated that as often as he told the story, which, over the years was fewer than a dozen times.

Bean, of course, sometimes pestered him for more information. After the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in 1977, she asked him about the movie and how authentic it might be. He said that it was the biggest load of crap he’d ever seen and not like the real thing at all. When she tried to learn more, he told her, “That’s all I can tell you. I can’t tell you anymore.”

The late Karl Pflock, in his book, Roswell, Inconvenient Facts and the Willto Believe, complained that Bean’s story was second hand and that neither her sister nor her mother would comment on it. Pflock had to know that both the mother and the other daughter had confirmed the tale because he had access to the video tapes of those 1991 interviews. He is right about this being a tale told by the daughters and wife of the man who lived it. There is nothing that can be done about that. By the time Brown’s name surfaced in the investigation, he had died from complications of various lung diseases, but it is not true that his wife or other daughter refused to talk.

Ada Brown added little to the complex tale told by Beverly Bean when she was interviewed on video tape in 1991. She merely confirmed that she too had heard about the crash over the years and that it was something from another world. She seemed a little uncomfortable sharing a secret left by her husband.

Bean’s sister, Harriet Kercher, on January 4, 1991, was also interviewed on video tape. She had heard her father tell his tales a couple of times when Beverly was there, but there was one incident when Beverly was absent and her father gave her just a little more information.

Kercher, in her early teens said that she was with friends when she saw something flash by. Her friends saw it too, and then, in the distance, that something reappeared and seemed to be coming at them. Kercher said they were frightened by that shiny object but they weren’t far from her house so they ran there, slamming the door behind them.

Her father met them and asked them why they seemed to be in such a panic. Kercher said that her father, after hearing the tale of the shining object, told her, “It’s nothing to be frightened about.

The friends didn’t understand, exactly, what he meant and he told them about the crashed flying saucer, saying that there were a few bodies on it. He provided few new details. He just made it clear that there was something about the creatures that suggested to him that they were not to be feared.

But, as Pflock said, these were second-hand reports and they could be the misinterpretation of the original story… It is not proof, or even a suggestion of proof of something extraterrestrial.

What this shows, simply, as that I have been fair with the reporting of this story. It is clear from this that Brown told us nothing himself. In my previous books, it was clear that Brown had died before any of us had a chance to interview him. By lifting quotes out of context it looks as if I had tried to mislead the reader. The truth is, all the information was there for the reader so that he or she could decide the merits of the information for him or herself.

Milton Sprouse — Roswell Witness?

Milton Sprouse, 86, spent ten years as a soldier stationed at the Roswell Army Air Field, and yes, he was there in July 1947 when the UFO crashed.

Sprouse’s name surfaced recently when he was interviewed by Gary Warth of the North County Times.

I talked to Sprouse the other day so that I could clarify some of the questions I had about what he had seen and who he had talked to.

I asked him if he had seen anything personally and he said, “I did not. I was a crew chief on a B-29 and I had to stand by my airplane in case it needed to fly.” He said that he had been in Tampa, Florida for three days and had returned on the day that it happen. That was when his friends told him about the crash.

But he said that a number of his friends were taken out to what I think of as the debris field and participated in the clean up there. Sprouse suggested that about 500 soldiers were on that field, moving shoulder to shoulder and picking up everything they could find.

He said that these men hadn’t seen the bodies because they had already been removed, and they didn’t see a craft. He did say, “There were big pieces… up to twelve inches or bigger all over that ranch. But they didn’t recognize what any of it was.”

He said that they laughed about the weather balloon explanation. He said, “I’ve seen weather balloons. They’ve been launched all around my airplane there at Roswell many times.” Which suggests that nearly everyone in Roswell would be familiar with what a weather balloon looked like and it seems unlikely anyone would be fooled by such debris.

One of this friends, a barracks buddy, had been a medic and had, one night, been called to the hospital. Sprouse said, “I lived in the barracks. I was single at the time… One of the barracks buddies was a sergeant and he worked in the Medics. He lived in the barracks.

And he got a call to report to the hospital and he went up and when he come back he said, ‘You wouldn’t believe what I been through and what I’ve seen.’ He didn’t have too much to say about anything because they told him not to talk about everything and we didn’t get much from him but later on he did say he was one of the few enlisted there and there were two doctors and two nurses in there. And of course he left right after that incident and never said good-by to us or nothing.”

Sprouse also told me that had recalled all the newspapers, meaning the July 8 edition of the Roswell Daily Recordin which it was reported that a flying saucer had been found, were picked up by the officers. He said, “They gave that story out first from the base. Walter [Haut] gave it out. Blanchard and Ramey must have okayed it because they gave it out and they printed the paper and then that’s when they recalled it, recalled all the papers and denied it and brought in that weather balloon.”

There are a few problems with Sprouse’s story. First is that he can’t remember any of the names of those who went out onto the debris field for the retrieval. He said that the names we found in the Yearbook for his crew were those who had joined him later, after these events. He said that his aircraft commander was Colonel William H. Harrison, and Harrison was certainly an aircraft commander at Roswell in the right time frame. But, when Sprouse called Harrison, he was told that he, Harrison, remembered very little. In fact, according to Sprouse, Harrison said, “‘I don’t remember, Milt, who you are.’ And he and I were friends because I was his crew chief for a heck of a long time. I flew all over the world with him… but I didn’t get to talk to his wife or nothing because he hung up on me after a while and I’ve never called him again because it was a waste of time because he didn’t know who I was and we had nothing to talk about in common.”

Second, while I have heard tales of newspapers printing flying saucer stories and that someone made an effort to recall all those newspapers, this is not something that had been associated with the Roswell case until now. It wasn’t effective because we have all seen the newspaper. I suppose they might have wanted to get it off the base to inhibit the soldiers talking about it and didn’t care what was left in the civilian community, but that makes no real sense.

Finally, we have been unable to discover who the medic was. He’s just another unnamed source who might have been a staff sergeant at the time, and who might have been promoted to what was known as a technical sergeant (now known as either a platoon sergeant or a sergeant first class) but that doesn’t help us much. There are eleven men in those two grades in the Yearbook. Yes, it will take some time to check them out with no guarantee that anyone of them will be the right guy. Haut said that fifteen to twenty percent of the soldiers at Roswell were not included in the Yearbook for a variety of reasons.

So, we are left with a second-hand story that might provide us with some clues about the Roswell case. We might be able to learn the name of Sprouse’s medic friend, then we might be able to find him, and he might still be alive. Of course the case is important enough that we should make these efforts.

As I learn more about this, I will publish the results. Until then we have an interesting tale that might grow into something important. Without additional corroboration we will have to leave it at that. It might be of importance. And then again, maybe not.

Patrick Saunders

Patrick Saunders (seen here), who was the Roswell Army Air Field adjutant in July 1947, died in 1995, but not before leaving a legacy of information about his role in the retrieval and cover up. Had something happened in Roswell, no matter what it had been, as the adjutant and a member of Colonel William Blanchard’s primary staff, Saunders would have been in on it. And, according to the information I have, he was not only in on it, he played a major part in it.

Before we look at all that, let’s take a moment to get to know the man himself. Saunders was born in Alabama in 1916 and died 76 years later in 1995 in Florida. He attended the University of Florida and was graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Air War College. During the Second World War he flew 37 combat missions and was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters. Patrick Saunders died in November 1995, after a fall that put him into the hospital.

I first talked to Saunders in June 1989, as I was beginning my research into the Roswell case. He had just gotten out of the hospital after a heart attack, which, had I known, I would have waited several weeks before calling him. Sometimes my timing was very bad. That didn’t mean he wasn’t up to a telephone conversation and when I asked about the possibility of the UFO crash, he said that he knew nothing about the little green bodies and said that the whole thing was a big joke. He did confirm that he had been the 509th adjutant for only a few weeks when the events of July 1947 transpired.

I 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, that was what he led me to believe at the time, which probably saved him from dozens of telephone calls from around the world wanting to know what the truth was.

But that really wasn’t the end of it. I learned that later, after both UFO Crash at Roswelland 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, he believed that was the truth.

The quotation, in his own handwriting, "Here's the truth and I still haven't told anybody anything! Pat" is on the flyleaf in The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswellwhich was labeled, “Damage Control,” and his comment is presumed to refer to that specific page. It said:

Files were altered. So were personal records, along with assignments and various codings and code words. Changing serial numbers ensured that those searching later would not be able to locate those who were involved in the recovery. Individuals were brought into Roswell from Alamogordo, Albuquerque and Los Alamos. The MP s were a special unit constructed of military police elements from Kirtland, Alamogordo, and Roswell. If the men didn’t know one another, or were separated after the event, they would be unable to compare notes and that would make the secret easier to keep.

On the flyleaf to UFO Crash at Roswell (seen on the next page), and sent on to his daughter, he wrote, “You were there! Love, Dad.” It said:

Of course it could be argued, and probably will be, that the messages are opened to interpretation. Here is a man who was at Roswell during the critical weeks suggesting, obliquely, that the information about the crash, retrieval and cover up is real. In fact, according to one letter I received from one of his children, Saunders had “At one point… bragged to me about how well he had covered the “paper trail” associated with the clean up!”

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.

He did warn those he talked with to be careful. He was aware of the threats that had been made and he believed that those making them were serious. Here was a retired Air Force officer who was warning his family to be careful about what they said and who they said it to. One of his daughters wrote, “…he asked me a lot of questions probably to see if, in fact, I had read [UFO Crash at Roswell] carefully. Then he wanted me to understand that he felt the threats to people who ‘talked’ were very real…”

So, once again, I’m confronted with information, from a reliable source, that suggests that threats were made. The people who heard those threats believed them to be real.

I’ll note one other thing. When the Air Force was making their Roswell investigation, they did not interview Saunders, though they certainly had the chance. He wasn’t all that old, only 76, and while his heart might have been weakened, he certainly had the strength to sit through an interview with another Air Force officer. Colonel Richard Weaver, who conducted some of these interviews in 1994, would have been welcomed in the Saunders home, as he was in others. But Weaver didn’t bother to search out Saunders, just as he failed to find Brigadier General Arthur Exon or ask to hear the tapes and read the notes that I had made with Edwin Easley. Why talk to those men, when you knew that Sheridan Cavitt would follow the script and that the men of Mogul would offer the information you needed to follow that lead?

What's important here is that Saunders did not share this information with UFO researchers or outsiders at all. He kept it to himself, telling close friends and family only after the story had been told by so many others. 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.

In fact, Saunders, when he prepared for his own funeral, added a note to his list of accomplishments, mentioning his role in Roswell. It was there beside the notes of his Air Force service, flying “the Hump” in the ChineseBurmese-Indian Theater in the Second World War, and the list of the awards and decorations he acquired during his military service. Clearly the events in Roswell were important to him.

What we have now are several statements, written in his own hand, and shared with friends and family. Statements that suggest that Saunders was deeply involved in the Roswell events and they had nothing to do with a balloon, regardless of the mission of that balloon or who was claiming that it was a balloon.