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

by Jesse Marcel

  I excused myself, went into my office, and picked up the phone. The caller still would not identify himself, but said he knew of my meeting in Washington and wanted to talk to me when I got there. He gave me a Capitol Building address at which to meet him, which I found somehow reassuring. I didn't really think that I was likely to be kidnapped by someone in the government. In hindsight, perhaps my sense of security wasn't well-founded, and I should not have felt so reassured. After all, this unknown government official had been tracking my whereabouts enough to know that I had been invited to a meeting on UFOs, and had obviously known when and where.

  Upon my arrival at my hotel in Washington, there was a message waiting for me from this same official. I couldn't help but wonder how he knew where I would be staying, almost before I knew myself. The message simply stated that he wanted to visit with me at the Capitol Building the following morning. Had I been an avid reader of intrigue novels, I would probably have been more alarmed than curious at his resourcefulless. As it was, I found it quite enticing that somebody would put such effort into contacting me.

  After reading the message, I went to my room to prepare for the meeting. At the meeting, I was going around chatting with people and introducing myself when an individual approached me and said there was someone who wanted to talk to me. He took me gently by the arm and guided me across the crowded room. I was introduced to a gentleman who was quite tall, and of central European descent. His name was Hans-Adam II of Lichtenstein. He asked me a few questions about Roswell, and after we had spoken for a few minutes, we went our separate ways to mingle among the other attendees. My impression of the party was that it had been interesting, and filled with an amenable group of people, but that it had not been particularly memorable. It was only later that I found out the gentleman who had sought me out was the party's host, the Prince of Lichtenstein. I reminded myself then that I needed to reevaluate my definition of the word memorable.

  The next morning, I went to the Capitol Building to meet with the mysterious government official. I was greeted by security, which checked and found my name on the appointment list. I was shown to an office, where I was left to sit in the outer lobby to await my meeting. As I sat there waiting, I remember feeling somewhat antsy, because my flight back home was going to be leaving later that afternoon, and I didn't want to miss it.

  After a few minutes, the government official emerged from his office and approached me, smiling and extending his hand. Nothing in particular about him stood out. He was the kind of person you would see on the street and never give another thought to-average height and weight, and friendly. He did not, however, waste any time with small talk, beyond a perfunctory, if seemingly warm, greeting. His demeanor stiffened a bit, and he actually kind of blurted out, "I understand that you saw… at Roswell. Could we tally about it? Do we need to go to a secure room?"

  I was put at ease with his friendly informality, as well as the implicit intrigue in his last question, but told him, "No. I have nothing to say that I haven't said before." He responded that he might have things to tell me that would require a secure room, and suggested that I follow him. We proceeded down a corridor that ended at an elevator that brought us deep underground. As we descended into the depths of the building, my wife's concerns came to the forefront of my mind, and I thought to myself that I might never see the light of day again. When the doors opened, we emerged into what appeared to be a basement area with concrete walls, steam piping, and corridors branching off from the one in which we stood.

  The official led me down a passageway to a doorway that led to a fancy paneled meeting room, similar to the main conference room one would find in any large company-save for the fact that there were no windows, as this room was deep underground. Inside the room was a long table with perhaps 30 chairs. On the walls above the table were pictures of the country's founding fathers. The overall impression I got was that this was a room used for private meetings of powerful people.

  My host closed the door behind me and sat at the head of the table. In front of him was a yellow legal pad and a copy of a book titled Majestic, by Whitley Strieber, for which I had written the foreword. He pointed to the book and stated, "This is not fiction." Although the book is a fictionalized story of the Roswell Incident, my host made it clear that he believed that the story of a UFO crash in Roswell was, indeed, a fact.

  He asked me to describe what I had seen in my family's kitchen that night so many years before. I closed my eyes for a moment, recalling that night as if it had happened a few nights before, rather than the decades that had passed. As I began to tell my story, my mind was filled with the minutest of details; the sounds, the textures, and weight of the items I had held, and even the strange symbols that had adorned the pieces of I-beam.

  He asked me where I thought the debris might be now, and I responded, "Don't you know? You guys are the ones that have it." I commented that I had often wondered about the "Blue Room" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that Barry Goldwater had mentioned in his writings, but had never been allowed to actually visit. (I'll discuss this in more detail in a little while.) My host answered that he did not know where the debris was.

  I asked him if he had seen the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he responded that he had. I asked if he remembered the last scene, in which a person is seen pushing a huge crate containing the Ark down the row of a giant warehouse, packed floor to ceiling with thousands upon thousands of similar-looking crates. He nodded his acknowledgment. I said, "Perhaps that's where it is." He laughed, and said I was probably right.

  At the end of our discussion, I told him that I had one question for him. I asked him when he thought the government would release the truth about UFOs, specifically about the Roswell Incident. He said that, honestly, if it were up to him, the veil of secrecy would have been lifted years ago. But, he added, it was unfortunately not up to him.

  He told me that he had been charged with the responsibility of investigating the operation of a "black government" within the government, where funds were being spent without appropriate oversight to maintain a false story about the Roswell Incident and cover the true story up. He said that his job was to report to the Senate Appropriations Committee, and advise them as to where these tax dollars were going, and why.

  I have to admit that I was pretty well stunned by his response. I had long known that there was a concerted effort on the part of the government to hide the truth of what had happened in July of 1947, but here was a government official standing right there in front of me, in a room reserved for secure government meetings, telling me that my suspicions were valid, and the cover-up real.

  He then asked me whether I had received any threatening phone calls. I told him about the anonymous hang-up calls, but assured him that none had gone so far as to actually threaten us. He then ripped off the top page of his legal pad, wrote down all of his contact information, and handed the paper to me, telling me that if I ever was threatened, I was to contact him immediately. To this day, I have kept that piece of paper, and have even stored a copy of the information in a safe place, should the need for it ever arise. I have never divulged the official's name to anyone, in keeping with the discretion he requested of-and offered to-me at our meeting.

  Our conversation then diverted to more mundane subjects as he led me from the conference room, back to the elevator, and finally out to the main lobby. He reiterated his instructions to call him if the situation we had discussed came to pass, and then he bid me farewell. We parted company, and I found that I had a great deal to think about on my way to the airport and on the flight home.

  I feel pretty certain that the debris remains in the control of the socalled black government, and am equally certain that it has been thoroughly researched, possibly offering up some technological insights that were heretofore unknown. As far as I know, this meeting was the first and only time that anyone associated with the government had tacitly admitted that the Roswell event was, as my father and I had
long known, the crash of a machine from another planet.

  The Black Government

  Ever since I spoke with that official back in the early 1990s, I have come to believe that the black government he spoke about is something more than the fabrication of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. So I ask you to please hear me out before you banish me to the tinfoil hat crowd. The black government consists of a specialized, unelected group of officials. They apparently have billions of dollars at their disposal to protect the rest of the government and the people from information that they consider to be in some way harmful or dangerous to our way of life. Their access to tax dollars is through other programs that either exist only on paper, or whose accounting methods allow them to accumulate funds covertly, without the encumbrance of a paper trail subject to any kind of oversight.

  In the movies, the members of this shadow organization have been fictionalized as the "Men In Black," clearly a case of art imitating life. It is in cases such as this that the line between science fiction and science fact is quite blurred. Although some members of our elected government-such as the official with whom I met-know about the black government, they discuss its existence very discreetly, if at all, knowing that if all evidence of an extraterrestrial visitation can be made to disappear, the elimination of an overly talkative government employee would be child's play.

  Earlier in this chapter, I referred to government officials such as Barry Coldwater, who were aware of-but not allowed to see-the area where I suspect the Roswell debris was hidden away. On these pages, I have reproduced a couple of documents that I feel add some credence to my suspicion that the Roswell debris is located at WrightPatterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio.

  Given the fact that I was informed by an obviously highly placed government official that my interpretation of the Roswell event is not fiction, and that there is an arm of the government that is neither elected by, nor accountable to the taxpayer, and which has at its disposal huge sums of money being spent illegally to keep events such as the Roswell story hidden from the public, I have to ask myself why.

  Does the government fear that allowing the public to know there are extraterrestrial civilizations would result in widespread panic? Would our sense of security be so challenged by the knowledge that those civilizations might be significantly more advanced than we are technologically, that our very society would be shaken as a result? Perhaps the government feels it cannot allow its citizens to even consider the possibility that we are not in control of our skies, and that our continued existence depends upon the good will of someone about whom we know virtually nothing. A frightening possibility, perhaps, if one is prone to fearfuhiess rather than common sense.

  My feeling is that a race (for lack of a better word) sufficiently advanced to be able to traverse the cosmos to visit us does not mean harm to us. After all, if they are that technologically advanced and wanted to harm us, it is doubtful that we would still be alive to worry about it. One thing that does concern me is that there may be many different civilizations out there capable of interstellar travel, and it may be our good fortune that the ones who have approached us thus far are benevolent in their intentions. Suppose, however, that there are civilizations out there whose intentions are less than benevolent, or who view us as so inferior as to be unworthy of their regard, who look upon us in much the same way as we look upon insects or rodents. God help us if one of those more malevolent types were to come calling. I, for one, would prefer to acknowledge and ultimately establish a positive relationship with the "good guys," whose friendship might prove invaluable to us, both as teachers and allies, should we face the unthinkable prospect of an attack from outside our little realm.

  Ultimately, the only way we can hope to develop a friendly relationship with any peoples-be they from our own world or beyondis by facing the truth, by learning all that we can about them, rather than hiding ourselves from their very existence. This is yet another case in which the decision to live in and act out of fear has the potential to cause that fear to come to fruition. We deserve better than that, and our government owes it to us to treat us as citizens, rather than as children.

  Chapter 7

  Other Visits

  For me, a big part of the Roswell legacy, beyond its effect on the (Marcel family, has been an abiding interest in ufology and space travel. These topics fascinate me. And although I don't want to stray too far off course, I think it appropriate at this point to briefly explore well-documented events that, although not directly related to Roswell, bolster the case of Roswell and UFO "believers." In this chapter, we'll look at a couple of unexplained UFO events that particularly interest me.

  Throughout the years I have studied a lot of so-called UFO incidents, and many have turned out to have earthly explanations-much to the disappointment, I'm sure, of some UFO enthusiasts. A few of these incidents, however, remain mysteries, and they are mysteries about which the government has been less than forthcoming. Take, for example, some of the strange goings-on in my home state of Montana.

  As I will discuss later, perhaps our government has worked so diligently to hide the truth about the Roswell crash to protect us from the fact that the military is not as invincible as it would have us believe. How safe would the American people feel if they knew that there existed a potential enemy that had the capability of getting past all our strategic defenses at will? Ironically, the Roswell Incident was far from the first-and certainly not the last-event to demonstrate just that. Furthermore, there have been incidents in more recent years that leave us to wonder whether the "visitors" necessarily hold to some noble principle such as the "Prime Directive" so often recited in the Star Trek franchise, which forbade influencing the internal affairs of other civilizations. Although Star Trek is of course fiction, one would hope that real-life interstellar travelers would have some sort of code that included a policy of noninterference. But maybe that's just wishful thinking on our part. (To tell the truth, I'm not so sure that humans would be able to avoid interfering if it suited their fancy; we don't seem to be very good about practicing our own finest principles.) At any rate, there are a couple of specific UFO instances that have never been properly explained by officials, and that could certainly be construed as evidence of extraterrestrial intervention in human activities. In these cases it was much to the chagrin of the people directly involved-most notably the military. If you're a skeptic, indulge me for a few moments while we look at a couple of incidents in which it seems that extraterrestrials (or something) actually demonstrated that they/it had the means to inhibit our ability to kill each other-essentially rendering the military irrelevant.

  The area around Great Falls, Montana, has had a high occurrence of UFO sightings since the 1950s. However, what happened on March 16, 1967, near Mahnstrom Air Force Base, just outside Great Falls, went pretty far beyond a mere sighting. On that morning, Crew Commander Captain Eric Carlson and Deputy Crew Commander First Lieutenant Walt Figel, the Echo Flight (E-Flight) Missile Combat Crew near Malmstrom Air Force Base, were below ground in the silo, in the E-Flight Launch Control Center. Missile maintenance crews and security teams had remained at two of the launch facilities after working there the previous day. During the early morning hours, the crews reported that they had seen several glowing, disc-shaped UFOs. Some of them were pretty disturbed by these sightings; one security policeman was reportedly so affected by this incident that he never returned to missile security duty.

  Around 8:30 that morning, the alarm horn sounded, indicating that one of the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), under the supervision of Figel and Carlson, had gone off alert, which meant it had become inoperable. Figel became understandably upset, figuring that the maintenance personnel had failed to notify him that maintenance work was being performed on a missile, necessitating putting it on "off-alert" status. Because such notification is required by very rigid procedure-after all, these were nuclear weapons-Figel immediately called the missile site, ready to gi
ve somebody a serious butt chewing.

  When Figel spoke with the on-site security guard, however, he learned that no maintenance work had been performed that morning. The guard also informed Figel that a UFO had been observed hovering directly over the site. At first, Figel thought that the guard must have been putting something in his thermos besides coffee.. until one by one, across the board, the other missiles also started to go off alert in rapid succession. Within seconds, the entire flight of 10 ICBMs was down, all indicating a "No Go" condition. When the troubleshooting procedure checklist had been completed for each missile site, it was discovered that the missiles had gone off alert status due to a Guidance and Control System fault, which typically occurs only after a loss of main and backup power. The troubleshooting checklist showed that there had been no such interruption of power to the sites, and that the missiles' guidance and control systems had simply and inexplicably-malfunctioned. Figel ordered two of the Echo Security Alert Teams (SATs) to those sites where the maintenance crews were present, but did not inform the teams of the reports about the UFO sighting. On arrival at the launch facilities, the SATs reported back that all of the maintenance and security personnel present at each site reported seeing UFOs hovering over each of the two sites.

  When Captain Don Crawford and his crew relieved the Echo Flight crew later that morning, Crawford noted that both Carlson and Figel were still visibly shaken. Crawford also recalled that the maintenance crews worked on the missiles the entire day and late into the night during his shift to bring the missiles back to ready condition. The end result was that a full complement of missiles-crucial elements in the country's deterrent forces-had been out of service for an entire day. Obviously, when such a significant and rare event occurs, all hell breaks loose, and anyone bearing any responsibility for the malfunction faces, at best, a reprimand, and at worst, severe disciplinary action. But after an extensive investigation by both Boeing (the chief contractor) and the military, there was no reasonable explanation for the event, much less a finding of culpability on the part of on-duty personnel.