by Len Kasten
PANDORA’S BOX
The stakes in this confrontation are very high. If it can be categorically proved that the Roswell crash did happen, then a cascading series of remarkable possibilities would become certainties. First, it would mean that there is intelligent life on other planets with technology greater than ours. This would have tremendous ramifications in terms of society, technology, weaponry, religion, economics, and more. Then, the sixty-year cover-up would imply the existence of a shadow government that continues in power from administration to administration. Otherwise, how could the fraud continue to be perpetrated so expertly? This, in turn, means that our democracy is an illusion and that we really live in some sort of oligarchy. Then, it would mean that we have most certainly gained extraordinary knowledge about our place in the universe that has not been shared with the public and that could possibly revolutionize our life here on Earth. Very possibly this knowledge could solve all our energy problems. And very probably we would now have the ability to travel to other star systems ourselves, which opens up vast vistas for the human race. These would all be colossal developments, and they all hinge on the reality of Roswell. To prove Roswell is to open Pandora’s box and the Stargate to our future, at one and the same time.
The dramatic events of those first ten days of July 1947 in that tiny, remote military town in the high plains of central New Mexico remained cloaked in impenetrable secrecy for more than thirty years! But interest slowly and unobtrusively built among UFO groups during that period. This activity culminated in 1978 with a historic two-hour presentation by researcher Leonard Stringfield at a monthly Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) meeting in Dayton, Ohio, in which Stringfield revealed the details of several crash retrievals throughout the Southwest and presented strong evidence that all the wreckage and several dead alien bodies ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Base right there in Dayton. Stringfield spoke of retrievals in Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Montana and gave prominent mention to one particular crash near Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947. His book, Situation Red: The UFO Siege, filled in many of the sketchy details.
Stringfield’s work drew the interest of researchers William Moore and Charles Berlitz, and in the summer of 1980 they unleashed the first book on the subject, The Roswell Incident, which has now become a classic. Veteran ufologist Stanton T. Friedman was a key researcher on that project, although he did not get authorship credit. After ten more years of research, he went on to write his own book about Roswell with Don Berliner, titled Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO, and ultimately has emerged as the preeminent authority on the subject. Since 1980, the Bunny drumbeat has picked up as dozens of other books have been written about Roswell, and the town itself has become a world-famous UFO mecca. But final proof of the crash has remained elusive because the government has continued to keep a tight lid on any information that could help researchers bolster their case and has, in fact, deliberately led them down blind alleys with planted disinformation. Hoping to provide the coup de grace to the cover-up and finally validate the Roswell crash, Jesse Marcel Jr. released his autobiographical book, Roswell: It Really Happened. He is the son of Major Jesse Marcel, who was the base security officer at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947.*10 I spoke with Marcel about his remembrances of his father and the book.
“IT WAS NOT A WEATHER BALLOON”
From the outset, it was clear to all the investigators that Major Jesse Marcel was the central figure in the case. In fact, it was Marcel’s involvement and testimony that first attracted Friedman, convinced him that the crash really did take place, and drew him into the investigation. As an Army Air Force intelligence officer with a distinguished war record, Marcel’s credibility was unchallenged. The 509th Bomb Group at Roswell was a top-secret facility, and everyone there had a high-level security clearance. As the base intelligence officer, Marcel was especially security conscious. Just prior to the Roswell assignment in 1946, Marcel had been in charge of security for Operation Crossroads, the ultrasecret Bikini Atoll nuclear test program, for which he was awarded a commendation. The top brass knew they had no reason to be worried about such a loyal and dedicated officer, especially since they promoted him to lieutenant colonel immediately after Roswell and spirited him away to a top Cold War job. Whether this was calculated to ensure his cooperation can only be a subject of speculation. So it is not surprising that Marcel remained silent about Roswell for thirty-two years. On the contrary, what was surprising was the fact that he agreed to the Friedman interview at all in 1979. Maybe it was because so much time had elapsed that he felt he could now speak freely. More likely, good soldier though he was, Marcel nevertheless came to realize that his first obligation was to humanity. As we will see, this was clearly the case, because he had already planted the seeds of revelation.
It was Marcel who received the phone call from Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox about the debris found on the sheep ranch of Mac Brazel that Sunday morning, July 6, 1947. And it was Marcel and counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt who drove out to the Brazel ranch and collected two carloads of the strange debris that stretched out over three-quarters of a mile. Of that discovery, Marcel said in his interview with Stanton Friedman as reported in Crash at Corona by Friedman and Don Berliner, “It was amazing to see the vast amount of area it covered . . . It’s something that must have exploded above ground, traveling perhaps at a high rate of speed . . . It was quite obvious to me . . . that it was not a weather balloon, nor was it an airplane or a missile . . . It was something I had never seen before, and I was pretty familiar with all air activities.”
ALIEN HIEROGLYPHICS
The material collected by Marcel and Cavitt was definitely not of this world. Marcel said, “This particular piece of metal was . . . about two feet long, and perhaps a foot wide. See, that stuff weighs nothing, it’s so thin, it isn’t any thicker than the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes. So I tried to bend the stuff [but] it wouldn’t bend. We even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. And there was still no dent in it. And, as of now, I still don’t know what it was.” Strangest of all were the fragments he described as “like parchment.” Among these parchmentlike pieces were small I beams inscribed with strange characters that appeared to have been painted on in a purple-violet color. Marcel said that they were “symbols that we had to call . . . hieroglyphics because I could not interpret them, they could not be read, they were just symbols, something that meant something and they were not all the same.” These fragments couldn’t be broken or burned. There was other tinfoil-like metal that always returned to a smooth state after being crumpled. The two men loaded up a Jeep Carry-All, and Marcel instructed Cavitt to drive that first load back to the base. He then went back out into the field and loaded up his 1942 Buick with more fragments. Even then, he says, “we picked up only a very small portion of the material that was there.”
That night, Marcel returned home late and woke his wife and son to show them what he had found. He spread the fragments out on the kitchen floor, and they all marveled at this strange stuff from space. Jesse Marcel Jr. was only eleven at the time, but he evidently appreciated the import of what he was seeing—and he never forgot that night. The next day, July 8, Marcel brought the debris back to the base and was immediately ordered by base commander Colonel William Blanchard to put it all on a B-29 and fly along with it to Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio, with a stop at the 8th Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. That same morning, Blanchard ordered base public information officer Lieutenant Walter Haut to issue a press release stating that the Air Force had recovered the wreckage of a “flying saucer.”
U.S. Army photo of Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel
Haut released the report to Roswell radio station KGFL, and the station, in turn, sent it to United Press International via Western Union, and so the story broke in the evening papers in the Midwest and the West. That’s when the cold, clammy hand of official suppression descended on R
oswell. In Fort Worth, Marcel was instructed by 8th Air Force Commanding General Roger Ramey to pose with him for photos showing that the wreckage was from a weather balloon and then was told to go home and forget the whole thing. A couple of days later, Army reconnaissance planes discovered the crashed disc itself and four alien bodies a few miles from the debris field.
THE DRAWINGS
Lieutenant Colonel Marcel died in 1986. Jesse Marcel Jr. went on to become a physician and a flight surgeon. At the age of forty-two, in 1978, he joined the National Guard and was trained as a helicopter pilot and became certified as a crash investigator. In March 1991, Marcel signed an affidavit (published as Roswell in Perspective by Karl Pflock in 1994) in which he described the material his father brought home that night in 1947. About the I beam, he said, “On the inner surface . . . there appeared to be a type of writing. The writing was a purple-violet hue and had an embossed appearance. The figures were composed of curved, geometric shapes. It had no resemblance to Russian, Japanese or any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics but had no animal-like characters.”
In that affidavit, Marcel said that his father was certain the material was not from a weather balloon and “may have mentioned the words, ‘flying saucer.’” In that document, he also drew a picture of the I beam about eighteen inches in length and showing the characters as best as he could remember them, and in a postscript he mentions that he showed the drawing to his mother and that she concurred with his description. While it is a rough drawing, each unique character is carefully delineated. Is it possible that the fifty-five-year-old Marcel could have remembered those characters so convincingly after only a quick look forty-four years previously when a boy of only eleven?
It now turns out that the answer to that question is “no, he could not.” In The Roswell Legacy, Marcel revealed for the first time that his father did more than simply gawk at the fragments arrayed on his kitchen floor that night in 1947. He sat down and made drawings as painstakingly accurate as possible, and that may have been his motive for bringing them home in the first place. He was a seasoned intelligence officer, so we can be confident that Marcel knew how detailed the drawings should be. Jesse Marcel Jr. kept those drawings under wraps for almost sixty years, and once he himself was retired and outside the reach of military obligation, he decided, as did his father in the interview with Friedman, to go public and leave this extremely important information to the world as his father’s legacy. The drawings are reproduced in his book. He told me that the I-beam characters had been decoded and explained, and this exciting information was also revealed in his book.
Jesse Marcel Jr.’s book may very well be the final word on Roswell. The fact that the artifacts are now proved to be of extraterrestrial origin means that all speculations have become certainties. It may have taken sixty years, but Jesse Marcel, thanks to the diligence of his son, has reached out from the grave and circumvented the official suppression machine with which he was very familiar, so that the world would know of that remarkable event in Roswell. Once again, fate has conspired to put the right person in the right place at the right time, for the benefit of humanity.
5
Roswell and America’s Destiny
The crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft outside of Roswell, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, has now taken on the dimensions of a historical watershed event comparable to other significant dates in world history, such as the invention of the printing press, the discovery of America by Columbus, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. More than any other event involving UFOs, this one has achieved mythic proportions and has succeeded in becoming the marker of the beginning of the space age. Why this should be so is not entirely clear. After all, it is now believed that the Nazis were dealing with ETs in the early 1930s. But certain events, in hindsight, just take on an aura of extraordinary importance and significance for the human race, for inexplicable reasons, and this is one of them. Before Roswell, the world continued to reflect on the horrors and glories of World War II. It was still a time of dance bands, the promise of the stock market, and total cosmological innocence. Distant stars were just the subjects of romantic songs. After Roswell, the entire planet entered a distinctly new and different era, and now the stars became the origins of strange new visitors to Earth. Everything changed. We were no longer alone in the universe.
When analyzing watershed events of this type, one can only marvel at their timing and geographic placement because they seem to occur at a time and place that are absolutely necessary so that subsequent events can most easily follow. It is as if a long freight train is steaming down the tracks, expecting the switch to be in place when it arrives at a crossing point. If that switch is not in place, the train will wreck, and its valuable freight will be scattered to the winds because it is not slowing down. But through some miraculous agency, the switch is thrown just in time, and the train passes safely through, now able to unload its precious cargo to anxiously waiting hands. In 1450, the Renaissance was the freight train carrying the burgeoning intellectual and artistic products of an explosive cultural revolution in Europe, but the hand-printing of literature was the exclusive province of the church and the royal courts because it was too expensive and time consuming for anyone else. If Johannes Gutenberg hadn’t invented the printing press at that moment in time in central Europe and thereby thrown that critical switch, the Renaissance, inspired by widespread access to classical art and literature, could never have happened, and we might still be in the Dark Ages.
THE REAL WAR OF THE WORLDS
The timing and geographic placement of the Roswell crash was extremely fortuitous, and it set in motion a chain of discoveries that allowed us to realize that we had been virtually catapulted into the middle of extraterrestrial warfare. According to Colonel Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes in the breakthrough book The Day After Roswell, this shocking realization caused a panic in the American military establishment when it was understood that we were actually pawns in a struggle between supertechnological adversaries, against whom we ourselves were practically defenseless. Out of this panic emerged a Faustian agreement with hostile aliens as we began to play the game of exopolitics while embarking on a crash program to develop the technology and weaponry we needed to protect the planet.
All of this has been conducted under a thick blanket of secrecy, allegedly to avoid alarming the public and creating financial anarchy. And the secrecy itself became a bargaining chit with the ETs. Our agreeing to the cover-up allowed them to carry out most of their nefarious operations away from the prying eyes of the press. In return for our collusion in keeping it all under wraps, they granted concessions that we probably could not have gotten otherwise, as we raced feverishly to catch up with technologies that were thousands of years in advance of our own. Unfortunately, we paid a heavy price for this agreement, since we lost the advantage of opening up the scientific problems to the best minds on the planet and instead relied only on scientists with a military affiliation who had to confine their research to strictly military objectives and were not free to explore ideas for technology that would benefit humanity. In fact, in the early days, many of them were ex-Nazis brought to America under Operation Paperclip who liked to work with weaponry and were not particularly concerned with advancing the human condition. From a military standpoint this was pragmatic, but it actually retarded scientific progress that could have been far more innovative.
In any case, says Corso, beginning in the early 1960s we were able to harvest incredible technological innovations from the crashed Roswell craft, including night-vision technology, fiber optics, lasers, and, most important, transistors, which revolutionized both industry and the military. He claims that we have now achieved a high level of defense against alien incursions. The turning point was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. According to Corso, satellite-mounted high-energy lasers and particle-beam weapons can now disable UFOs with pinpoint accurac
y.
