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

by Jesse Marcel

  Sometimes I wondered whether I might be to blame for some of their growing distance from each other, and I tried harder to be a good son to compensate. I even wondered whether my dad might have grown angry with me for some reason, because he didn't seem to enjoy doing things with me as much. For many years, I figured that the distance between us was supposed to be there; a product of my growing up. It took many years to figure out, but I eventually realized that it wasn't I who was coming between my parents, and that the distance that seemed to be growing between my dad and me had nothing to do with growing up, or with anything I had done. Rather, it was my father's reaction to his deep and growing disillusionment with his beloved military, the sense that he had devoted so much of his life to something, only to be spit out when he became "inconvenient." He was also affected by the growing clamor of those who felt the need to belittle everything for which he stood and for which he had worked so hard throughout his adult life.

  To his dying day, he would never come out and actually condemn the military, and I have to believe that even his long-enduring sense of loyalty only added to his bitterness. The closest he ever came to that condemnation was when I was about 14 years old, just about the time the Korean War was beginning. He came home one night and proclaimed, "I'm getting out of this! I'm tired of taking orders!" That was one of the few times I ever got angry at my father, and I told him-with all the moral authority of a 14-year-old-that he couldn't quit during a war. He just looked at me for a second, shook his head, and went into the other room. Without his speaking another word, that look told me that there were things I just didn't understand, and he hoped I never would. It was many years before I was able to completely comprehend the volumes he had spoken in that silent moment. I wish there was a way for me to let him know that I finally got it. It took my own service in another war-this one in the desert of Iraq, a mission in which I firmly believe-before I could truly understand the changes he went through.

  I believe I can speak with some authority on what he was going through, because I have endured much of the same kind of feelings and experiences in my own life. The biggest difference is that I learned early on that upping the number of after-hours cocktails doesn't make things better, and that the one true remedy for disillusionment is found in the time spent with the people I love. My father taught me, even if unknowingly, to hold tightly to truth and to those people who valued me for what I am, rather than where I stood on any given issue. It is because of him that I am able to stand up and tell what I know — and have always known — to be true, realizing that there will always be someone who will try to discredit what I say, and, by extension, me.

  Not surprisingly, the legacy of Roswell-the story as well as the doubts and the emotional strain that comes with those doubts-has carried on through three generations in my family. That it affected my parents and me should come as no surprise to anyone. That it has had such a profound effect upon my own children, however, caught even me by surprise.

  Crowing up in a home where the reality of alien visitation is accepted as fact can be very frightening to a child. It wasn't that we sat around the dinner table every night talking about creatures from outer space, but rather that Linda's and my attitude toward the whole idea was pretty blase. As a matter of fact, the topic of UFOs rarely ever came up during family discussions. We weren't members of the tinfoil hat group, who sat around contemplating when the next visit would occur, and when we saw something on television or in the paper about people who claimed to have been abducted or to be in contact with alien visitors, we probably laughed at their stories as much as anyone else.

  When we had friends over, however, and especially when we entertained people who were active in UFO research, the children would naturally overhear our conversations. Lacking the sense of security that usually comes with adulthood, the children's perception was that of a danger to themselves and us that we adults simply never considered. Perhaps it would have been better for them if I had insulated them from the subject when they were little, but given that most of the people we luiew were aware that I was the guy who had actually handled pieces of a "flying saucer," keeping the children in the dark would have been awfully hard-if not impossible-to do. So, for better or for worse, the children found themselves pretty much in the middle of the whole UFO controversy, especially where the incident at Roswell was concerned.

  Linda and I have talked with the children-who are all adults now-on numerous occasions about UFOs and what they had thought and felt about the subject while they were growing up. They were, at various times and depending upon the particular child, frightened, embarrassed, bored, or indifferent.

  As far as their relationship with the man who started it all, I have to say that none of our kids was ever very close to my dad. He lived in Louisiana and we lived in Montana, and visits were rare. I spoke to my mom and dad every Sunday, but the kids rarely did. Even after my father passed away and my mom came to live with Linda and me, the kids never became very close to their grandmother. Nevertheless, Roswell was part of their lives.

  Our daughter MacKenzie told us that she remembers always being frightened that the aliens would come someday and abduct her and her older sister, Marissa. She said that when we used to drive to our condo in Big Sky to ski, she worried that aliens would come and get us. She went on to explain that she was most afraid when we were driving at night through a canyon to get to the mountain, where she feared the aliens could swoop down and take us without anybody seeing what happened, and no one would ever know what had become of us all.

  She also said she was scared when we went to California for the premier of the TV movie Roswell. At the premier, my step-daughter Ashlee, who was 19 or 20 at the time, was in heaven with all the attention she was getting. While attending the festivities, we stayed in the Universal Hilton penthouse, an environment that, to the kids, must have been as wondrous as the Emerald City of Oz. I remember chuckling at Linda at the time, because the windows of our suite were all glass, and due to Linda being terrified of heights, she made us keep all the curtains pulled. As one would imagine, trying to block such a magnificent view from children who were in awe of it was a significant challenge.

  The premier party was incredibly exciting to the girls, who had their first opportunity to see so many celebrities up close and in person. Linda, however, didn't have a clue who these people were, because she never watched television, and paid no attention to the "who's who" of the movie world.

  My daughter Denice has always been interested in science fiction, and wasn't afraid as was MacKenzie. Similar to many young girls, she had dreams of being a movie star. When Paul Davids gave her a brief part in Roswell, she was on cloud nine. (If you look quickly and pay close attention, she is the waitress in the officer's club when Glenn Dennis meets with the mystery nurse.)

  The producers had a limo pick us up to take us to the premiere, and MacKenzie, who was around 10 years old at the time, thought that perhaps the aliens had sent it. All through the showing, MacKenzie kept her eyes tightly shut, and wouldn't watch the movie because it scared her so badly. We couldn't even watch an innocent movie like ET because she was so afraid. She lived in fear that the "gray people," as she called them, would get her.

  Even as an adult, she admits that some of that fear remains. MacKenzie told us that when we went to Roswell for the 50th anniversary of the crash, when she was 12, she was still apprehensive, fearing that it was a likely time for the aliens to show up. Furthermore, she did not like being around everyone wearing alien costumes, probably because she figured that a real alien could easily hide among them until the opportunity presented itself to snatch us up. She even hated all the alien paraphernalia everywhere you looked.

  I was never really sure what her older sister Marissa felt, as she never seemed to make a big deal of the whole alien thing, one way or the other. When she was in high school and college, people would frequently ask her if she was related to Jesse Marcel. In fact, on one occasion, she was having dinner
at her roommate's parents' house when the adults started talking about Roswell. She said that she just sat quietly and listened to the conversation, until finally her roommate said that the little boy they were talking about was Marissa's dad. At that point, she said, everyone turned and stared at her, which was pretty uncomfortable. They apparently hadn't connected the Marcel name, but once the secret was out, they all got very excited, and deluged Rissa with all kinds of questions. I can only imagine how that must have felt to her.

  Aimee and Ashlee were typical teenage girls, whose primary reaction to their stepfather's fame, such as it was, could be summed up in one word: embarrassment. Similar to all teenagers, they wanted to stand out with their peers, but not for something their stepfather had done. I'm sure that they were the brunt of some teasing by the other kids nothing really serious or malicious, but cruel in the way that kids of all ages tend to be. As a result, they acted as though the whole UFO/ Roswell scenario simply didn't exist, and if one of their friends mentioned seeing me on television, they would change the subject as quickly as possible.

  I'm certain that the family's immersion in the UFO controversy had its effect on how we looked at other things as well. For example, I can remember that when we lived in our 1880s mansion in Helena, Rissa and Linda told me that they were always seeing an unexplainable green light floating around inside the place. Many strange things happened in that house, but we always thought it was the ghost of Mrs. Tatum, the lady who had first lived there. But maybe MacKenzie was closer to knowing the real source after all. We'll probably never know, but it was good for more than one interesting conversation at family dinners!

  One day, sometime in the middle '70s, I was driving home with my sons Jay and John, and we all saw a strange object a little ways south of where we were, flying from the east to the west against a fairly strong prevailing wind. We immediately jumped out and stood in the yard to get a better look. Even though it obviously had to be under its own power to fly against the wind, it made virtually no sound. The total time it was visible was less than half a minute, and we were all completely awed by what we had seen. After it had passed out of sight, the three of us went into the house and independently drew pictures of what we had just seen. When we compared our drawings, each one looked virtually identical to the others: Each drawing was of a classic disc-shaped UFO (though John's drawing was really kind of a teardrop-shaped blob). Considering that he was only six or seven years old at the time, I thought he did a pretty good job of capturing the image. Needless to say, we were all excited by the experience. I had actually forgotten about the event until they reminded me about it, and I had been saying for years that I had never seen one of those things. Memory is a strange thing. Something that you think never existed comes back in a flash. Maybe some part of me was trying to suppress it for the last 30 years or so, though I'm certain that some people would proclaim that I had been abducted, and that the "little green men" had eras ed my memory. I figure, if that's what they find most entertaining…

  Jay and John were always interested in science fiction, and loved to look through our telescope at the moon and stars. In fact, all the kids enjoyed the times we spent on cloudless nights, searching the heavens. The boys and I liked flying the radio-controlled planes and helicopters we built, and because we have usually lived in areas without power poles, we had plenty of opportunities to fly them in the fields. They loved to make bottle rockets and send them aloft in the foothills around our house, to the never-ending amazement of their friends. They also enjoyed creating electrical circuits, helping me build Tesla coils, and "inventing" all kinds of electrical circuits, some of which actually did something useful (or at least entertaining). I knew they were having a good time, and tried to keep a fairly close eye on what they were creating (especially because Linda pretty much lived in fear that they would blow up the house or set it on fire-which, thankfully, they never did, though they sometimes came closer than I chose to tell her).

  Even as interested as the boys were in all things scientific, they tended to feel uncomfortable with the UFO aspect of our lives as they were growing up. As we all know, young boys will use anything they can find to get a leg up on the other boys in their crowd, and Jay and John ended up being the target of a lot of teasing, simply because there was something about them that differentiated them from their friends-namely, that their dad had seen and handled a UFO. Tease a kid enough, especially about his parents, and he will either start to avoid you or get right in your face, sometimes with a fist. I don't think the boys got into that many fights over my UFO connection, and probably wouldn't have told me if they did. They were, for the most part, well-behaved and good natured, but as do all young boys, they lived by a code that demanded that they keep some things secret from Mom and Dad. Besides, I know all too well how even the telling of an unhappy event can make it seem even more real and more important, and feeling embarrassed about your dad is not something to which a kid wants to give any more substance.

  Just as any parent, I've regretted the discomfort, the fear, and the embarrassment that my father's and my experiences have caused for my family. Even now, the specter of Roswell is creating rifts in our family, causing me no end of despair. I've been asked many times whether I would prefer that the Roswell Incident never have happened at all, and I must admit that there have been times when I felt that life would have been a lot easier, and my family's and my path much smoother, had we never even heard of Roswell.

  But then again, I recall the wonder in my father's eyes, and the sense of awe that must have shown in mine, and I realize that, despite the challenges it brought to my parents, my wife, my children, and myself, the events of that July evening 60 years ago represent something infinitely more important than the inconveniences we might have endured as a result. That night offered humanity a rare opportunity to look beyond its petty squabbles, and even beyond the boundaries of this tiny planet on which we live. It gave us a glimpse of a greater universe, and the chance to make the most of our place in it. And to my way of thinking, the "insurmountable" hassles we have faced as a result are a pretty cheap price to pay. My hope is that we can one day be allowed to know the truth, and perhaps to even look back on our resistance to that truth with the same benign judgment we apply to the things we did as little children. For, in the grand universal scheme of things, perhaps little children are what we are after all.

  Chapter 10

  Life in the Cosmos: Beyond Roswell

  As I pointed out early in this book, I am not attempting to write the be-all and end-all work on the topic of extraterrestrial life, the technology involved in space travel, or even the final analysis of what happened near Roswell back in 1947. Those topics would require many tomes of far greater volume and depth than this one. Like my father before me, I have been filled with an insatiable scientific curiosity all my life, particularly on subjects arising from my early experiences. I have done extensive research in the areas of ufology, quantum physics, alien visitations and abductions, humans' attempts to communicate with other worlds, and even the incredibly dynamic physical makeup of our own planet. (To give you an idea of the depth of my obsession with the latter, I once even built my own seismograph, with which I was able to measure earthquakes all over the world.) I won't bore you with all of the fascinating facts and theories I have encountered, but I do want to share a few tidbits of the work that has been and is being done to discover the answers to the question, Are we alone?"

  First, to give you a perspective of how vast the distances in the universe are, if the sun were the size of a period on this page, the Earth would be an invisible speck an inch away, and the nearest star would be 3/4 of a mile off. A passenger plane would take 5 million years to make the voyage to the nearest star, and it would take a billion years to walk it. These facts open the door to all kinds of problems with interstellar travel, which we will need major scientific breakthroughs to overcome. We know that some civilizations have made this leap, because they are visiting us
from their parent systems. If they can do it, then we can and will, given time. Considering the insatiable human curiosity and our need to advance, I have no doubt that we will accomplish space travel and join other spacefaring civilizations soon enough.

  Breakthroughs Necessary for Space Travel

  A significant part of some people's unwillingness to accept the existence of visitors from another world lies in the extraordinary distance between Earth and its closest potential neighbor. Although our modes of travel here on Earth-as well as our forays into our solar system-have progressed dramatically in our lifetime, we still rely upon technologies that are dependent upon a crude action-reaction process, and we comprehend speed in miles per hour, or, at best, feet per second. Travel to planets in other solar systems at speeds of which we are presently capable would take more years than have passed throughout all of humankind's recorded history. And even if we were to attempt a trip lasting many millennia, the amount of fuel we would have to carry would weigh more than we could even get off the ground, to say nothing of getting it high enough to escape Earth's gravitational pull. To give an example of how daunting the challenge would be, the amount of rocket fuel it would take to propel a large bus to the nearest star in 900 years would outweigh the universe! And for those of you who immediately ask, "Why not use a nuclear fission-powered rocket?" it has been calculated that it would take a billion super-tankers full of nuclear fuel to get the bus to the nearest star in only 900 years. Of course, using a fusion-powered rocket would save an immense amount of weight, but such a rocket would still require a thousand supertankers filled with fuel. For those of you who are science fiction aficionados familiar with antimatter propulsion, it has been calculated that it would take merely 10 railway tanker cars filled with antimatter to make the trip, but we are still talking about a 900-year, one-way journey. Given these present limitations, it is not surprising that some people remain skeptical of the possibility that others have actually accomplished things that we have difficulty even imagining.