The Roswell Legacy: The Untold Story of the First Military Officer at the 1947 Crash Site

by Jesse Marcel

  Jesse Marcel Jr., Linda Marcel

  The Roswell Legacy: The Untold Story of the First Military Officer at the 1947 Crash Site

  This book is dedicated to Jesse A. Marcel, Sr., Major, United States Army Air Force.

  Acknowledgments

  The list of people to whom this book should be dedicated is most certainly longer than would fit on a few pages. For the sake of brevity, I will list those who come to mind most readily. First and foremost, I dedicate this book to an Army Air Force officer, my greatest hero with his eyes to the skies. Dad, I have kept my promise!

  My wife, Linda, has stood beside me through more than any woman should be expected to endure. She has goaded me-always lovingly-to do what we both knew I needed to do, allowed me to rant at the injustices of the world, and reassured me when I felt that life was most unfair.

  To Dr. Herb Brosz - a down-to-earth Montana cowboy.

  To all my kids, we've had our great times, as well as some not so great, but I think that each of you know that I've always loved you.

  To my fellow men and women in arms, I cannot begin to express the pride I feel for having been so privileged as to serve with you. May you all be kept safe, and feel the honor you so greatly deserve.

  To Stan Friedman, what can I say? Your unbending quest for truth has been an inspiration to me, and I am ever grateful for your support throughout the years.

  To Ron Kaye and Connie Schmidt, I give my thanks for turning decades of memories into a book in which my father and I can take real pride.

  And finally, to you, my readers. It is my hope that you will always seek-and find-truth, and that one day, the world will look at you and share your hunger. May your lives be filled with wonder, every day.

  Foreword by Stanton T. Friedman

  I had no idea when I first heard the name Jesse Marcel that 28 years later I would still be involved in the investigation of the phenomenon known as the Roswell Incident. I was at a TV station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1978, to do three different interviews to help promote my lecture "Flying Saucers ARE Real" at Louisiana State University that evening. The first two interviews had gone off without a hitch. Unfortunately, the third reporter was nowhere to be found in those pre-cell-phone days. The station manager was giving me coffee, apologizing, looking at his watch. He knew the woman who had brought me to the station for the university, and that other activities were scheduled. We were just chatting, when, out of the blue, he said, The person you ought to tall, to is Jesse Marcel."

  Being the outstanding UFO investigator and the nuclear physicist that I am, my response was really not very sharp. "Who is he?" I asked. My teeth practically fell out when he said, "Oh, he handled wreckage of one of those saucers you are interested in when he was in the military."

  "What? What do you know about him? Where is he?"

  "He lives over in Houma. He's a great guy. We are old ham radio buddies. You ought to talk to him!"

  By this time the reporter had shown up. Fortunately the launch window had been just long enough for another UFO case to be brought up. The interview was done, and there was a great crowd that night at LSU. The next day, from the airport, I called telephone information in Houma. I had no idea where it was, other than that it was in Louisiana. There was a listing for a Jesse A. Marcel, so I called him.

  I mentioned the TV station manager as a kind of reference, and then we spoke for some while. Jesse told me his story about his involvement in the recovery of strange wreckage outside Roswell, New Mexico, in company with Counter Intelligence Corps officer Sheridan "Cav" Cavitt, on orders from Colonel William Blanchard, the base commander. Jesse had been a major, the base intelligence officer. The story of what happened has since been told in numerous books, such as The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, and Crash at Corona by Don Berliner and myself.

  Jesse noted that he had been told not to say anything, but that just after the incident occurred, his picture had appeared in newspapers all over the United States, and some overseas. The "official" explanation was that what was recovered was just a weather balloon radar reflector. But Marcel never believed that, and the notion that neither he nor Colonel Blanchard (who was later a four-star general) could not recognize such a common device was absurd.

  The problem for me was that, at first, Jesse didn't remember the precise date of the incident. Yet his story was credible, and it whetted my curiosity. I knew that the summer of 1947 had been a very busy flying saucer time, beginning with the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting in June, and escalating in the next few weeks. But I really didn't have enough to go on at that point.

  So, after speaking with Jesse, I filed the story in my gray basket and shared it with Bill Moore, whom I knew because we had both earlier been active in the UFO Research Institute of Pittsburgh back in the late 1960s. Bill had moved to Minnesota, and I was living in Hayward, California, and lecturing all over. A few months later, after a lecture to a packed hall that I gave at Bemidji State College in Bemidji, Minnesota, I was quietly approached, at my table of papers, by Vern and Jean Maltais, who asked if I had heard anything about a crashed saucer in New Mexico. I said I had heard something, but wanted to know more. They spoke of the experience of their friend Grady "Barney" Barnett, who had worked for the soil conservation service out of Socorro, New Mexico. Barnett had seen a crashed saucer and strange bodies, and was chased off by the military along with some college people who were also there. But the Maltaises didn't have an exact date either. I obtained phone and address contact information from them, and the next day I passed them on to Bill Moore, who was then teaching in Minnesota.

  Bill found a third story about a crashed saucer in New Mexico in the English magazine, Flying Saucer Review. This story was about an English actor, Hughie Green, who had heard a story on the radio while driving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He was able to pin down the date as early July, 1947, as such trips were not very common back then. Bill went to the Periodicals Department at the University of Minnesota Library and found the story. This was a real boost, as it named other people that were involved, and validated what Jesse had said. On July 8, 1947, many evening newspapers all over the United States carried the very exciting story of a crashed saucer (sometimes called a disc) recovered by a rancher outside Roswell.

  This began an intensive research effort that lasted years for Bill and me. In 1980, the first book, The Roswell Incident by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz (of Bermuda Triangle fame), was published. Bill and I had done most of the work, finding 62 people in those preInternet times. By 1985 we had published about five papers, presented mostly at annual meetings of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). We had spoken with 92 people. We both had spoken to Dr. Jesse Marcel, and had been very favorably impressed.

  Around 1988, a rather strange TV broadcast called UFO Cover-up? Live done in Washington, D.C., had been set up by Bill, working with Jaime Shandera, a Hollywood TV producer. Jesse was brought in for it, as was I. At the time I was living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, and Bill was living in Southern California.

  I'd actually known Jaime for quite a few years. He had contacted me before I moved to New Brunswick, and had brought Bill in to help with doing a script for a short-lived movie project. They continued to work together, and kept me informed. Meanwhile, in 1978, I had been heavily involved as co-script writer, technical advisor, and on location for the production of UFOsARE Real, a 93-minute documentary for Group One of Hollywood. Major Marcel was one of the people w
e interviewed, and that's when I finally went to Houma to meet him in person.

  A number of books and documentaries have been done about Roswell since the late 1980s. One of the best was done by NBC's Unsolved Mysteries, for which both Jesse Jr. and I were interviewed. Some of the documentaries were by Roswell debunkers, much of whose research was often of the armchair-theorist variety. The debunkers had several basic rules, including: (A) Don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up, (B) What the public doesn't know I won't tell them, (C) Do your research by proclamation, because investigation is too much trouble, and (D) If you can't attack the data, attack the people.

  I spent a great deal of effort throughout the years dealing with the false arguments of the naysayers. The problem is that we researchers have been racing the undertaker. Inevitably, we lose, though new witnesses do turn up sometimes. As the only Roswell researcher who has been in the homes of both Jesse Sr., who died in 1986, and Jesse Jr., I have been in a better position than most to deal with the criticisms, and nobody has ever accused me of being shy about expressing my opinion when I have done my homework.

  For example, I published a very strong commentary in UFO Magazine about the sleazy treatment of the Roswell story by the late ABC journalist Peter Jennings on February 24, 2005. Not only wasn't it noted that I was a nuclear physicist, but, though they interviewed Dr. Marcel at greater length, they didn't bother to make mention of the fact that he was a medical doctor, a flight surgeon, a helicopter pilot, and serving as colonel in the Army in Iraq when the program was finally broadcast. Any reasonable person would agree that these facts are relevant to credibility. It was almost funny that the debunkers on the show, such as SETI specialists and Harvard psychologists, had their full titles presented, despite their lack of familiarity with the evidence.

  Some people have asked, "So why did all those so-called witnesses go running to Friedman and Moore? Just to get on TV?" The fact of the matter is that they didn't. We had to work hard to find the witnesses. One critic was sure that Walter Haut, who had issued the famous press release of July 8,1947, had just made up the story and put it out on his own. Considering that the military group at Roswell was the 509th Composite Bomb Group, the most elite military group in the world, that is absurd. They had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had hand-picked officers and high security. Some debunkers have foolishly claimed that Colonel Blanchard must have been sent to Siberia for putting out that stupid story. In actuality, he received four more promotions. At the time of his death of a massive heart attack in May 1966, he was a four-star general and vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force.

  Another common question has been, "If security was so tight, how come Jesse Marcel was blabbing to a ham radio buddy and to UFO lecturer Stan Friedman?" That's not the case at all. Truth be told, years after my meeting with the TV station guy, I finally asked him what Jesse had actually told him about what happened. His answer was, "I asked him about the story, and he said that was something he couldn't talk about." He had read the story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, which mentioned that Jesse was from Houma. The most important witnesses, such as Jesse, Walter Haut, then-Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose, the rancher Mac Brazel, and others, all were mentioned in the contemporary press coverage. These men didn't ask for publicity, but once they got it, they could hardly deny their involvement. However, Cavitt, whom Moore and I located by 1980, wasn't mentioned in 1947, and kept avoiding telling anything useful until he gave false testimony to Colonel Richard Weaver about what he had found. Weaver's massive 1994 volume, The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, provided many official lies about the Mogul balloon explanation, as did the "crash test dummy" explanation of a second volume, The Roswell Report: Case Closed.

  Frankly, I was pleased to be asked to contribute the foreword to Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr.'s book. The story needs to be told by someone of such high integrity as Dr. Marcel, someone who was so close to the long-ago events and people involved in them. He makes the people come alive.

  The world has waited a long time for the inside scoop on Roswell. Truth is an excellent curative for false proclamations. The Roswell crashed saucer retrieval is one of the most important UFO cases ever, anywhere. We need more information from those directly involved, and this book provides a good deal of important new material.

  Stanton T Friedman

  fsphys @rogers. com

  Introduction

  When I was 11, my life took a strange and wondrous turn late one summer night in the kitchen of my family's modest little home in Roswell, New Mexico. It was on that night that my father, Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., showed my mother and me the debris from a mysterious crash that had occurred a few weeks earlier on a ranch about 75 miles northwest of Roswell.

  As we examined the debris and carefully handled it, my dad's excitement was almost palpable. Though my father was the senior intelligence officer on a base that was home to the country's most closely guarded secrets, he was, to his family, a pretty laid-back guy, who took everything in stride. But on that night, I saw another side of him. It was a mixture of excitement and confusion, suffused with a sense of wonder that one just doesn't see in many grown men. His attitude, combined with the odd nature of the material itself, made a deep impression on me. This was clearly like nothing that had been seen on Earth before. But neither my dad nor I had any notion of the profound influence that the Roswell Incident would have on the popular culture in the coming years. We certainly had no idea that the specter of Roswell would haunt our family for decades.

  By most official accounts, the crash that produced the debris had occurred in mid-June of 1947. On or about June 14, William "Mac" Brazel, foreman of the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, found a large amount of what some accounts described merely as paper, rubber, and foil garbage. But my father and I have always known that it was much more than that.

  When Brazel reported to the local sheriff that he might have found some wreckage from a genuine flying saucer, the sheriff contacted the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), where my father was stationed. My father and a Counterintelligence Corps agent, Captain Sheridan Cavitt, drove out to the ranch to examine and collect the property, and on July 8, the public information office at the RAAF announced that they had recovered the remains of a "flying disc." Not surprisingly, this caused a great stir in the media, and added fuel to the flying-saucer frenzy.

  The excitement generated by the RAAF announcement was quickly deflected, however, when Brigadier General Roger Ramey at the Fort Worth Army Air Base ordered that the debris be sent to him for examination. He subsequently held a press conference, at which my father was present, and announced that the wreckage was from an errant weather balloon. My father was ordered to pose for a nowfamous photograph in which he was holding some weather balloon debris. After the general's announcement, the Roswell story was dead as far as the public was concerned. But it really wasn't dead; it was merely dormant, and remained that way for more than 30 years, until a nuclear physicist and respected UFO researcher named Stanton Friedman met with my father and discussed what was really found that night in New Mexico. When Friedman made his findings-and my father's statements-public, Roswell once again appeared on the public radar.

  For my family, the story had never really died, although my father had been ordered to keep silent about the matter. Being a good officer, he remained silent for decades, even though he knew that there were big enough holes in the "official" stories about the crash and ensuing investigation to drive a truck through. To his dying day, my father was absolutely firm in his conviction that the material we examined was as he described it, "not of this Earth," and that the truth about Roswell had yet to be revealed to the public.

  In the 60 years that have passed since what has become known as the Roswell Incident, we have seen quite a parade of characters involving themselves in alternately trying to prove or dismiss the notion that the crash at Roswell was extraterrestrial in origin. Many, if not most o
f these people, have also been engaged in the issue of whether or not Earth has been visited by beings from another planet, or whether or not such beings even exist. Yet, for all the efforts expended by both factions, we seem to be no closer to separating fact from fiction on the subject.

  This is not particularly surprising when you look at the members of each faction. On the "believers"' side, the most vocal proponents and, unfortunately, those who get the most media coverage-seem to belong to the "tuifoil hats" brigade. These are the people who offer such bizarre tales of abduction and the like that it is nearly impossible for any rational person to take them seriously. The most vehement members on the "naysayers"' side, however, usually use dismissal and denial-rather than actual evidence-in their attempts to refute anything that is inconsistent with their perspectives. Some, unfortunately, even resort to character attacks, as I have come to know all too well. In an attempt to bolster their arguments and refute evidence on the "pro-ET" side, some have questioned my father's credibility as well as his credentials. They have even tried to besmirch his wife, my mother, by implying that merely by being the niece of a Louisiana governor, she was somehow involved in corrupt Louisiana politics, and therefore not to be believed.

  The result of the decades-long polarization and name-call ng is that there has been little objective information available to those who are cautiously skeptical, as well as those open-minded skeptics who acknowledge the possibility-if not the presence of proof-that the debris found near Roswell was indeed extraterrestrial in origin. This is unfortunate not only for people who want to know the truth about Roswell, but also for all who are interested in the question of whether there is extraterrestrial life, and if so, whether the ETs have the technology to visit Earth.

  To add to the confusion, it seems that all of the different factions have offered their own interpretations of events described by my father. Although some of those interpretations held reasonably close to the accounts he had given over the years, others seemed to take on a life of their own, ignoring or embellishing his actual narratives, with some of the would-be debunkers appearing to be more focused on diminishing my father's credibility than on uncovering the truth.