FROM THE FILES OF MARTIN CANNON |
FILE #22 |
The 1947 "UFO" crash at Roswell, New Mexico is the case which revitalized and revolutionized ufology. The investigators have withstood many attacks; "Roswologists" (if I can be forgiven such a ghastly coinage) have taken a drumming and kept on humming. Saucer fans fixate upon each detail of the incident like mystics contemplating the stations of the cross, and God help the writer who hints at an explanation divergent from the "UC" (ufologically correct) interpretation.
Until recently, my interests have focused not so much on the Roswell inquiry as on its sequelae. Ever since 1979, when author William Moore rediscovered the case, bizarre and elaborate deception operations followed upon his find like boxcars after a locomotive engine. As we shall see in the next chapter, a pattern emerged during the 1980s: Mysterious sources boasting military credentials would meet with writers and journalists and relate astounding tales about governmental interaction with alien races -- an interaction which, these sources claimed, began with Roswell. While such fables initially took in the more gullible saucer buffs, most now agree that these sources were feeding ufologists a steady diet of red herring.
The "UC" explanation for these hoaxes holds that the Roswell testimony constitutes the long-sought proof of alien visitation, which government operatives have sought to bury under a barrage of disinformation. I disagree with this view. The evidence proffered by Roswologists allows for a possible terrestrial solution, one not-unrelated to the history of MKULTRA. If this solution is correct, Roswell was indeed a scandal, though not one of extraterrestrial origin.
I can hear the groans: Not another Roswell theory... Many have championed their own explanatory scenarios, and, so far, none has triumphed over the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But this entrant may prove a hardier competitor, and deserves its day in the arena.
Although Roswell has received wide publicity, and has even inspired an enjoyable made-for-cable film, many readers may not yet have the basics. Therefore, I offer a precis, based on published and privately-distributed materials, and on my discussions with various researchers.
According to the accepted wisdom, a wayward alien craft exploded during a thunderstorm on either July 2 or July 4, 1947). Debris rained over a sheep ranch belonging to W.W. "Mac" Brazel, 10 miles northwest of Roswell and 30 miles southwest of Corona. The next morning, Brazel and his sons discovered a field filled with shards of an extremely light-weight metal and a foil-like substance surprisingly resistant to tearing or wrinkling. A sledgehammer couldn't dent the stuff, and a cigarette lighter couldn't burn it.
The ranch had no telephone, so Brazel did not report his find until he made a trip to the city on July 6. After a quick chat with the local Sheriff, the rancher briefed Major Jesse Marcel, chief intelligence officer at the local Army Air Base -- home of the 509th Bomb group, specially trained to deliver atomic payloads. After consulting higher authority, Marcel received orders to investigate the crash site; Captain Sheridan "Cav" Cavitt, a counterintelligence specialist, tagged along.
On July 7, at the ranch, Marcel found the inexplicable foil and a flexible material similar to balsa wood, but much stronger, imprinted with pink and purple "heiroglyphics." He also found scattered shards of an unusually resilient substance like Bakelite or plastic. That evening, Marcel took some of this material home, showed it to his wife and son, and enthusiastically announced that he had found the remains of a crashed flying saucer.
Later, a team of soldiers scooped up the wreckage, brought it back to the base and loaded it aboard a B-29, which flew to Fort Worth, Texas. The debris went on to Ohio's Wright Field (later re-named Wright-Patterson). Apparently, the military used heavy-handed tactics to convince Brazel that silence would be the better part of patriotism.
On July 8, the public information officer at Roswell base, Walter Haut, issued a press release stating that the 509th had recovered a flying saucer. Haut's superiors quickly squelched the report; his military career didn't last much longer. To fend off reporters' inquiries, the military needed to come up with a clever diversion, and fast. Thus, at Fort Worth, Brigadier General Roger Ramey announced that the wreckage was simply a downed weather balloon. He even allowed newsmen to photograph Marcel and others posing with the recovered "balloon" pieces. The unlucky Marcel became the scapegoat -- the Air Force intelligence officer who couldn't even recognize a downed weather balloon.
Ramey's story held until the late 1970s, when researcher William Moore, journalist Bob Pratt, engineer Stanton Friedman and the indefatigable Leonard Stringfield gave the matter a fresh look. Marcel, still alive at that time, admitted that the "weather balloon" story was phoney, and insisted that the debris came from somewhere other than Earth. Moore co-wrote a book called the Roswell Incident with Charles Berlitz, whose well-known name helped garner a sizable advance. The book mixes solid facts with silly rumors, a situation Moore blames on his former partner. Still, the basic story got out, and other researchers became interested.
According to Moore and his close associate, television producer Jaime Shandera, the material photographed in Ramey's office back in 1947 was the actual debris from Marcel's ranch. Most other ufologists believe that the photographs actually depict an unrelated downed weather balloon, which Ramey sneakily substituted for the real thing.
Moore backs his version of events with statements from Jesse Marcel and then-Colonel Thomas J. DuBose, who both appear in the controversial photos. If their assertions are true -- if even one of those images depicts the actual wreckage found on Brazel's ranch -- then the Roswell case receives a punishing (though not necessarily mortal) blow. The silvery stuff in the photos simply doesn't look like saucer shearings: The miraculous, "invulnerable" substance appears very wrinkled and torn.
Air Force Captain Kevin Randle, who has written extensively about Roswell, insists that the photographs depict a substituted weather balloon. Unfortunately, Randle backs his version by citing an interview with Walter Haut, who reportedly got the story from Jesse Marcel. Since Haut was not in the room (or even in Fort Worth) when the photographs were taken, the direct testimony of Marcel and DuBose should, arguably, take precedence over Haut's recollections. When Randle and his former partner Don Schmitt published their initial research into Roswell, Jaime Shandera sent a harshly-worded reply, focusing primarily on the issue of first-hand vs. second-hand testimony. While much of Randle's work is admirable, Moore and Shandera have, on this score, raised a fair point, and one can only wonder why Randle's books refuse to acknowledge the fact that this dispute exists. Apparently, he has decided to ignore any and all Roswell data collected by Bill Moore, who has become a controversial figure due to his claimed involvement with a group of intelligence operatives, as well as his suspected authorship of the "MJ-12" documents. (We will soon discuss these matters at greater length.) But does the Moore imbroglio justify tossing out tape-recorded testimony from key witnesses Marcel and DuBose?
Oddly, one of the photographs depicts Marcel smiling, looking quite as proud as a fisherman with a prize catch. If his superior had ordered him to pose with substituted material as part of a cover story -- one which makes him appear rather foolish -- then he would probably have worn a different expression: dour, embarrassed, serious.
While all now agree that something unusual fell on Brazel's ranch, not everyone endorses the extraterrestrial explanation. In 1994, after prodding from New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff, the DOD came up with a revised standard version of the Roswell incident: The crashed object was constructed for a top-secret balloon project called "Mogul."
Project Mogul studied the phenomenon of atmospheric sound channels, at one time a highly-classified subject. At a certain level in the atmosphere, sound waves travel extremely far. The scientists involved in Mogul hoped to use constant-level balloons to "overhear" possible nuclear explosions emanating from the Soviet Union (which did not yet possess the bomb but was working toward that goal).
Many ufologists are under the impression that the Mogul theory originated with the military. Actually, the idea was first explored in 1990 by ufologists Peter Gersten and Robert Todd, who -- after acquiring a number of Mogul documents on microfilm -- discovered that a cluster of ten polyethelene balloons was launched from Holloman Air Force Base on July 3, 1947. Did that experiment also launch the Roswell tale...?
To counter this suggestion, partisans of the extraterrestrial hypothesis noted that the debris found on the ranch scarcely resembled polyethelyne (which Moore, in a conversation with me, derisively called "saran wrap"). An April 19, 1949 document, sent to the Air Force's Project "Grudge" (an early UFO study) from Captain A.C. Trakowski of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, broadly addresses the question of whether secret balloon launches could have caused UFO reports. While the analysis does not mention Mogul by name, the June 3 launch is referenced. The balloons went down shortly after take-off. Although the material was not recovered, airplanes spotted it in a remote canyon, located many miles away from the Brazel spread.
Thus ended the Mogul idea -- until the Department of Defense revived it. Their new, improved theory relies on the recollections of Professor Charles B. Moore (no relation to Bill Moore) of the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research in Socorro, New Mexico. Professor Moore, now in his 80s, was in charge of the 1947 Mogul balloon launches. No-one can fairly call him a saucer debunker, since he reported a still-unexplained UFO in 1949, and counted J. Allen Hynek among his friends.
In correspondence with iconoclastic researcher Jim Moseley, Professor Moore has argued that the Brazel debris probably resulted from a July 4 balloon launch intended to test a new type of radar target, not used with conventional weather balloons. "The people who had previously found radiosondes and weather balloon debris would not have recognized the ML-306/AP targets because they would not have seen them before." These targets were composed of an unusual material which, according to one balloon expert I spoke with, combined aluminum foil and wax paper. Professor Moore reports that the reinforcement tape had designs printed on it (consisting of squares, diamonds, flowers, circles, etc.), possibly accounting for the "heiroglyphics."
Although the actual Mogul balloons were made of the then-new material polyethylene, the scientists decided to use standard balloons -- composed of neoprene, a rubber-like substance -- for initial tests of this new radar target. In June of 1947, an ML-306/AP device was attached to a cluster of neoprene balloons and launched from Alamagordo Army Air Force Base. As the balloons ascended, the neoprene expanded and burst; the cluster descended, and dragged the ML-306/AP along the desert floor. Brazel found the results.
Or so runs the theory...
The Roswell Daily Record of July 9, 1947 printed an interview with Brazel, who described the substance as "smoky grey in color." "That," said Professor Moore in 1994, "is exactly how I would describe the color of neoprene rubber balloons that have been stretched (as occurs in ascending to high altitudes) and exposed to direct sunlight for several hours." Roswell proponents counter that military officers accompanied Brazel during this interview (conducted on the evening of the 8th), indicating that the rancher recited a cover story under duress.
Initially, the Mogul theory seems quite attractive, since it explains the debris, its shipment to Wright Field, and the ensuing cover-up. But closer examination raises serious objections.
Could Jesse Marcel have mistaken Mogul material for a crashed saucer? Proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis point out that he learned all about the secret balloon launches in 1948, and therefore would not have remained confused about the origin of Mogul balloon debris. Marcel certainly should have recognized neoprene. Brazel's ranch became the repository for a very large amount of material -- more, surely, than one shredded radiosonde (however novel the design) could account for. And according to Professor Moore, the rigid beams were made of "balsa (or other light wood)," which scarcely corresponds with Marcel's description: "...solid members that you could not bend or break but it didn't look like metal."
The heiroglyphics pose a special problem: In his controversial interview with the Roswell Daily Record, Mac Brazel reported that "Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed on it had been used," while Jesse Marcel Jr. (now Dr. Marcel) has recalled "different geometric shapes, leaves, and symbols." These descriptions broadly accord with Professor Moore's. The elder Marcel, however, reported that the writing on the rigid struts seemed to represent a complex, unknown language comparable to Chinese.
In 1995, the Air Force released a report arguing that the Roswell debris resulted from the crash of Mogul balloon Flight No. 4, launched a month earlier. But Randle has uncovered good evidence that this cluster carried no array train, and thus could not have caused the debris.
Perhaps the most damaging argument against the Mogul theory derives from the fact that great secrecy did not surround the materials used in the Mogul balloon clusters. Launches connected to Mogul were photographed, and pictures of the balloons were printed in local newspapers. The Trakowski document cited earlier was never "top secret," even though it describes a Mogul launch. Only the objective of the program was highly classified.
Why, then, did military authorities throw up a cordon around the crash site? Why was the debris at the Air Base moved to bomb pit number one, which previously stored only weapons? Why did military personnel demand the small amount of debris which Brazel had given to the Sheriff? Why do we have so many credible reports that witnesses -- including the Sheriff -- were threatened with death or imprisonment if they talked? Why was Brazel detained for nearly a week? Why did paranoia about the recovered material reach such outlandish heights?
And why, years later (in the summer of 1949) did the military demand a few scraps of debris still possessed by Brazel's son? By this time, the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic device, and the secret Mogul sought to discover was secret no more.
The Mogul theory is fetching, and explains much -- but not all. The origin of the debris remains enigmatic. But was it extraterrestrial?
All terrestrial explanations would immediately fall to shreds if someone could prove the nagging reports that searchers in 1947 found actual alien bodies. After the television program Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment on Roswell in 1990, a colorful yarn-spinner named Gerry Anderson came forward, claiming to have seen -- when he was all of five years old -- a crashed ship and alien bodies on the Plains of San Augustin, over 100 miles away from Brazel's spread. He backed this tall tale with a "diary," which analysis proved to be written with a pen and ink not produced until at least 1970. Anderson's former wife and co-workers have labelled him a habitual liar.
Anderson cribbed part of his fable from the already-published story of G rady L. "Barney" Barnett, a soil conservation engineer. Barnett died in 1969, before Roswell research began, but his friends L.W. Maltais and J.F. Danley later stepped forward and maintained that, on July 3, 1947, Barnett encountered a crashed disk, complete with alien bodies, on the Plains of San Augustin, near Magdelena. A team of university archeologists just happened to show up in this spot at that moment; they too saw the wreckage. Soon thereafter, a red-haired military man appeared, and swore all the witnesses to secrecy. Army personnel from Roswell then scooped up the bodies and the wreckage.
So Barnett claimed -- or rather, so Barnett's associates claimed he claimed. But all this information arrives second-hand, and relies on decades-old memories. Proponents ask us to believe that the military let Barnett and co. go on their way with little more than a warning, even though authorities placed rancher "Mac" Brazel (whose find was, by comparison, much less spectacular) in rough detention for nearly a week. None of the archeologists have ever come forward. Kevin Randle has uncovered a diary kept by Barnett's wife, which notes that he spent July 3-7, 1947 in the office. (The earliest proposed time for the crash was the night of July 2.) Randle now discounts the entire tale of a second crash site near Magdelena, since no reliable first-hand eyewitnesses have come forward, and even the second-hand testimony has proven dubious.
However: According to Randle, there was a genuine second crash site much closer to Roswell -- specifically, some 35 miles northwest of the Army Air field. At this site, the military discovered the bulk of the craft, as well as a (varying) number of alien bodies. A number of witnesses have come forward to substantiate this claim. Some of these witnesses are hard to dismiss -- although skeptics, needless to say, remain skeptical.
Debunkers point out that ufology is now a business in the city of Roswell, NM, which boasts two museums attracting some 20,000 visitors a year. All those tourists spend money on museum donations, books, souveniers, gasoline, motel rooms, stuffed sopapillas, and so forth. That sort of financial injection can mean a lot to the economy of a small, isolated town -- leading Phil Klass and others to argue that some UFO crash witnesses may be motivated by something other than the quest for truth.
Take, for example, the tale of Jim Ragsdale. Kevin Randle accepts his story (corroborated by family members) that, on the night of July 4, 1947, he and a ladyfriend witnessed the crash and discovered alien bodies and a battered spacecraft; the military immediately arrived, scaring the couple off. Klass counters that Ragsdale has, in different interviews, switched the main crash site by at least 50 miles. Moreover, this witness now also reports finding 15 golden "alien" helmets, which he buried in the desert! (Tourists, bring your metal detectors...)
Ragsdale's major claim -- that the military found alien bodies immediately after the crash -- contrasts sharply with the testimony of Glenn Dennis. In 1947, Dennis was a young mortician employed by the Ballard funeral home, which had an exclusive contract with Roswell Army Air Field. In the first Randle/Schmitt book, Dennis claims that Roswell authorites wanted three small caskets (or possibly one hermetically-sealed casket) sufficient to preserve three bodies "that had been out on the prairie for a couple of days, maybe a week." The former mortician has told differing stories as to whether the military men actually took any child-sized caskets.
Dennis, whom all Roswell researchers consider a key witness, tells an even more interesting tale. He had befriended (and perhaps was engaged to) a nurse who worked at the base hospital, who asked to meet Dennis on July 6 at the Officer's Club. Demanding secrecy, she told Dennis that unfamiliar doctors had autopsied an alien creature, who possessed four fingers (but no thumbs) with suction-cup tips.
Shortly after this revelatory conversation at the Officer's Club, the nurse was transferred to England. Dennis later received a notice that she had died in the crash of a military airplane. At least, such was the tale Dennis told investigators for the Fund for UFO Research. In another interview, he said that he heard that the nurse did not die in 1947, but became a nun and died later.
With just a smidgen of rationalization, one can, I suppose, iron out these discrepancies. But Dennis' story still has one basic problem: The nurse is a phantom, bereft of traceable family or documentation. Dennis has told some researchers the woman bore the unlikely name of Naomi Maria Selff. The double-f in this name hints that Dennis may be an aficionado of anagrams; possible source phrases include "I'm a NASA life-form," "I'm false, of airman," "Am I of alien farms?" or (my favorite) "Affirm Anomalies." Whatever the onamastics of the case, no evidence indicates that such a person ever existed; Roswell has had a Selff-less history. If Dennis gave a phony name, why won't he divulge the true one?
Another concern: This witness happens to be a life-long friend of Walter Haut, the Roswell public information officer who started it all (and who now runs one of Roswell's UFO museums). Yet Haut told Philip Klass that Dennis never mentioned any of this business until late 1988 or early 1989.
We will not even go into the case of one prominent crash eyewitness, a former Air Force captain who gave his rank as "General" to a Roswell researcher. Problems of varying testimony and imploding witness credibility have prompted Jenny Randles, Britain's premiere ufologist, to offer the following observations:
Frankly, I worry that what is a credible story is in danger of being sunk by an over-abundance of witnesses and testimony. There can be little doubt that some jokers will have entered the fray once the case received big publicity. It is certainly difficult to know these days who is being sincere and who, to be blunt, is riding the bandwagon of publicity...
As you walk down the streets of Roswell, listen closely and you'll hear the ghost of Jimmy Durante remind you that "Evrabody wants ta get into da act!"
Still, even a deck three-quarters filled with jokers might have an ace or two left in it. And some of the "second site" witnesses are difficult to ignore. For example, Don Ecker (a careful researcher) interviewed a witness named Thomas Gonzalez, who claims that he attended the retrieval of alien corpses from the crash site. Another indvidual, Steve MacKenzie, has reported in a sworn affidavit that he tracked the object on radar, and later saw five dead aliens at the crash locale, including one with a "serene" look on its face.
Sergeant Melvin E. Brown, stationed at the base, guarded a truck carrying items removed from the crash site. Reportedly, Brown pulled back a tarpaulin and caught a glimpse of alien cadavers; their yellowish, leathery epidermis resembled a beaded reptilian skin. Unfortunately, we don't have this testimony from Brown himself, who died in in 1986; the reports come from his daughter Beverly Bean, who says that her father gingerly began to discuss Roswell circa 1980, after the initial printed accounts appeared. The Roswell literature does not clarify how much of the Brown story comes from the period of his final illness.
Captain Oliver "Pappy" Henderson, of Roswell's First Air Transport Unit, reportedly flew UFO debris to Wright Air Field. Again, the primary witness is deceased: The information comes to us by way of his wife, Sappho Henderson, who reports that her late husband began to talk about the subject when a tabloid mentioned the Roswell crash in 1980. Captain Henderson told her that the tabloid's description of the bodies was accurate. Randle accepts that Henderson saw the bodies himself; however, Joe Stefula (a more skeptical investigator) believes that, regarding the bodies, Henderson may have reported what he heard from another source.
Whitley Streiber and Kevin Randle set great store by the testimony of Brigadier General Arthur Exon. More skeptical investigators wonder whether Exon speaks of things he experienced personally, or whether he is simply reporting what he heard from others -- for example, from Captain Henderson, who was Exon's good friend for a number of years. There's a difference between confirmation and repetition of witness testimony.
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