Luckily enough for me, the whole Roswell story was still unknown outside the highest military circles in 1961. Retired major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer at the 509th who had been at the crash site in July 1947 and who had given the initial reports of a spacecraft, would not yet tell his story in public for at least another ten years. Everyone else connected to the incident was either dead or sworn to silence.
The air force, which moved quickly to take over management of the Roswell affair and ongoing UFO contacts and sightings, still kept everything they learned highly classified under the Air Force Intelligence Command and waged a push-and-pull war with the CIA for information about sightings and ongoing contacts with anything extraterrestrial. These really weren’t my concerns yet, but they would be.
My research was not concerned with the crash at Roswell itself, nor at Corona or at San Agustin—if those crashes did, in fact, occur in early July 1947—but on the day after Roswell, the day Bill Blanchard from the 509th crated up the alien debris and shipped it to Fort Bliss, where Gen. Roger Ramey’s staff determined its final disposition and the official government history of the event began to unfold.
In the early hours after the cargo arrived in Texas, there was so much confusion about what was found and what wasn’t found that army officers, who were in charge of the entire retrieval operation, quickly scraped together both a cover story and a plan to silence all the military and civilian witnesses to the recovery. The cover story was easy. General Ramey ordered Maj. Jesse Marcel to recant his “flying saucer” story and pose for a news photo with debris from a weather balloon, which he described as the wreckage the retrieval team recovered from outside Roswell. Marcel followed orders and the flying saucer officially became a weather balloon.
The silencing of military witnesses was also accomplished easily enough through top-down orders from General Ramey to everyone at the 509th and at Fort Bliss to deny that they were a part of any operation to recover anything other than a balloon. Once the material left Ramey’s command and arrived at Lt. Gen. Nathan P. Twining’s Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, all General Ramey had to do was keep denying what he was already denying and it was no longer his responsibility. Now it belonged to General Twining, from whose desk a whole new era of army involvement with the Roswell material began.
General Ramey treated the incident as a threat to national security and deployed whatever forces he could to bring the material back for evaluation and to suppress any rumors that might light a brushfire of panic. Therefore, Ramey used the counterintelligence personnel already posted to the 509th and ordered them deployed into the civilian community as well as the military to use any means necessary to suppress the story of the crash and retrieval. No news should be allowed to get out, no speculation was to be tolerated, and the story already circulating about a crashed flying saucer had to be quashed.
By the next morning, July 8, the suppression of the crash story was in full operation. The army had already issued a new cover story to the press by the time CIC officers had gotten to the witnesses and, using threats and outright promises of cash, forced them to recant their statements about what they saw. Rancher Mac Brazel, who first said he had been at the site during the recovery and had described the strange debris, disappeared for two days and then showed up in town driving a new pickup truck and denying he’d ever seen anything. CIC officers turned up at people’s houses and spoke quietly to parents about what their children had learned. Whatever people thought was happening, army personnel said, wasn’t, and it would have to stay that way.
“You didn’t see a thing,” they ordered. “Nothing happened here. Let me hear you repeat that.”
The silencing worked so well that for the next thirty years the story seemed to have been swallowed up by the quiet emptiness of desert where all things are worn down to a fine grade of sameness. But belying the quiet that settled over Roswell, a thousand miles away, part of the U.S. military went on wartime alert as bits and pieces of the craft reached their destinations. One of those destinations, Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining’s desk at Wright Field, was the focal point from which the Roswell artifacts would reach the Foreign Technology desk at the Pentagon.
Among the first of the army’s top commands notified of the events unfolding in Roswell in early July would have had to have been Lieutenant General Twining’s Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, where the Roswell debris was shipped. Nathan Twining has become important to UFO researchers because of his association with a number of highly secret meetings at the Eisenhower White House having to do with the national security issues posed by the discovery of UFOs and his relationship to National Security Special Assistant Robert Cutler, who was the liaison between the NSC and President Eisenhower when I was on the NSC staff in the 1950s. The silver-haired General Twining was the point man for initial research and dissemination of Roswell-related materials and, partly because of the capability with which he administered the vital AMC at Wright, he became part of an ad hoc group of top military and civilian officials assembled by President Truman to advise him about the Roswell discovery and its national security implications.
General Twining had been scheduled to travel to the West Coast in early July 1947, but he canceled the trip, remaining in New Mexico at the army’s air base at Alamogordo until at least July 10. Alamogordo was important not just because it was the nation’s nuclear-weapons test site in the 1940s and 1950s but because it was also a field office of the AMC itself, where rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and others were primarily based. Close by was the White Sands guided-missile base, where some of our military’s most advanced tracking and embryonic targeting radars were deployed. These were sensitive installations, especially during the UFO activity that week, and it made perfect sense that immediately after the recovery of the UFO the army general whose responsibility it would have been to manage the retrieval was almost directly on-site conferring with his top scientists.
Although I never saw the actual memos from President Truman to General Twining regarding his trip to New Mexico, I had heard stories about secret orders that Truman had issued to General Twining directing him to New Mexico to investigate the reports of the crash and to report directly to the White House on what he’d found. I believe that it was General Twining’s initial report to the President that confirmed that the army had retrieved something from the desert and might have suggested the need for the formation of an advisory group to develop policy about whatever was discovered. And, remember, in those first forty-eight hours, nobody really knew what this was.
By the time the Roswell debris had been shipped out of Fort Bliss and had arrived at Wright Field, General Twining had flown back from New Mexico to Wright to oversee the analysis and evaluation of the Roswell treasure trove. Twining moved quickly once back at his office. The alien bodies had to be autopsied in utmost secrecy and the spacecraft and its contents analyzed, cataloged, and prepared for dissemination to various facilities within the military. Inasmuch as everything about the crash was given the highest security classification, stories had to be prepared for those with lower security classifications but whose contributions could be important to the creation of a credible cover story.
The official camouflage was almost as important to the military in 1947 as it was in 1961 when I took over. It was important because as far as the army was concerned, 1947 was still wartime, a Cold War, perhaps, but war nevertheless, and stories about military hardware as valuable as the material retrieved from Roswell could not be disclosed for fear that the Soviets would exploit it. Thus, from day 1, the army treated its retrieval of the debris as if it were an operation conducted in a wartime theater under battle conditions. Roswell became military intelligence.
General Twining had seen the material for himself, and even before he returned to Wright Field, he’d conferred with the rocket scientists who were part of his brain trust at Alamogordo. Now, during the remainder of the summer months, he quietly compiled a report that he would deliver
to President Truman and an ad hoc group of military, government, and civilian officials, who would ultimately become the chief policy makers for what would become an ongoing contact with extraterrestrials over the ensuing fifty years. And as stories of the Roswell crash and other UFO sightings around U.S. military bases began to filter in through the command chain of the armed services, General Twining also needed to establish a lower security channel along which he could exchange information with other commands that were not cleared all the way to the top.
General Twining still reported to higher-ups who, though they may not have had the security clearance he had with regard to extraterrestrial contact, nevertheless were his commanding officers and routinely sought information from the AMC. Accordingly, General Twining needed to maintain a quasi cover-up even within the military.
The first of these reports was transmitted from General Twining to the commanding general of Army Air Forces in Washington, dated September 23, 1947. Written to the attention of Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, Twining’s memo addressed, in the most general of terms, the official Air Materiel Command’s intelligence regarding “flying discs.” He drew a remarkable number of conclusions, most of which, I had to surmise when I was on Eisenhower’s National Security Council and then again when I got to the Pentagon, were based on Twining’s own firsthand experience with the sighting reports from Roswell and other sighting reports as well as the materials themselves, which were in the military’s possession.
Flying saucers or UFOs are not illusions, Twining says, referring to the sighting of strange objects in the sky as “something real and not visionary or fictitious.” Even though he cites the possibility that some of the sightings are only meteors or other natural occurrences, he says that the reports are based upon real sightings of actual objects “approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to be as large as man-made aircraft.” Considering that this report was never intended for public scrutiny, especially in 1947, Twining marveled at the aircrafts’ operating characteristics and went on record, drawing major conclusions about the material he had and the reports he’d heard or read. But, when he wrote that the extreme maneuverability of the aircraft and their “evasive” actions when sighted “or contacted” by friendly aircraft and radar led him to believe that they were either “manually, automatically, or remotely” flown, he not only suggested a guided flight but imparted a hostile intent to their evasive maneuvers to avoid contact. His characterization of the aircrafts’ behavior revealed, even weeks after the physical encounter, that those officers in the military who were now running the yet-to-be-code-named extraterrestrial contact project already considered these objects and those entities who controlled them a military threat.
He described the aircraft as it had been reported in the sightings: a “light reflective or metallic surface,” “absence of a trail except in those few instances when the object was operating under high performance conditions,” “circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top,” flights in formation consisting of from “three to nine objects,” and no sound except for those instances when “a substantial rumbling roar was noted.” The objects moved quickly for aircraft at that time, he noted to General Schulgen, at level flight speeds above three hundred knots.
Were the United States to build such an aircraft, especially one with a range of over seven thousand miles, the cost, commitment, administrative and development overhead, and drain on existing high-technology projects required that the entire project should be independent or outside of the normal weapons-development bureaucracy. In other words, as I interpreted the memo, Twining was suggesting to the commander of the Army Air Force that were the air force, which would become a separate branch of the military by the following year, to attempt to exploit the technology that had quite literally dropped into its lap, it had to do so separately and independently from any normal weapons-development program. The descriptions of the supersecret projects at Nellis Air Force Base or Area 51 in the Nevada desert seem to fit the profile of the kind of recommendation that General Twining was making, especially the employment of the “skunk works” group at Lockheed in the development of the Stealth fighter and B2 bomber.
Not revealing to the Army Air Forces command that Twining himself had been ordered to visit bases in New Mexico in the hours after the crash, the general advised his bosses that the military should consider whether the flying disks were of domestic origin, “the product of some high-security project” already developed by the United States outside of normal channels, or developed by a foreign power that “has a form of propulsion possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge.” At the same time, weaving a cover story that takes him out of the loop of reporting any of these flying disks as a firsthand observer, Twining writes that there is a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects.”
But, even though General Twining has just written that there is no evidence, he nevertheless recommends to his superiors that:
• • •
Headquarters, Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of this matter to include the preparation of complete sets of all available and pertinent data which will then be made available to the Army, Navy, Atomic Energy Commission, JRDB, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, NACA, and the RAND and NEPA projects for comments and recommendations, with a preliminary report to be forwarded within 15 days of receipt of the data and a detailed report thereafter every 30 days as the investigation develops. A complete interchange of data should be effected.
• • •
This was an important part of the memo, at least for me and my research into how the army got the Roswell file, because it accounted for the army’s dissemination of the Roswell materials and accompanying reports within only a couple of months after the material’s arrival at Wright Field. When General Twining suggested to his commanding officers at AAF that all the military branches as well as existing government and civilian commissions needed to share this information, the dispersal of the materials was already under way. This is how the technology came into the possession of Army R&D.
Finally, the general promised the Army Air Forces command that the Air Materiel Command would continue to investigate the phenomenon within its own resources in order to define its nature further and it would route any more information it developed through channels. Three days after the memo, on September 26, 1947, General Twining gave his report on the Roswell crash and its implications for the United States to President Truman and a short list of officials he convened to begin the management of this top-secret combination of inquiry, police development, and “ops.” This working group, which included Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Secretary James Forrestal, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Dr. Detlev Bronk, Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, Sidney W. Souers, Gordon Gray, Dr. Donald Menzel, Gen. Robert M. Montague, Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, and Gen. Nathan Twining himself, became the nucleus for an ongoing fifty-year operation that some people have called “Majestic-12.”
At the Eisenhower White House, it was simply referred to as “the group,” and in the days after Roswell it went into operation just as smoothly as slipping your new 1949 Buick with its “Dynaflow” automatic transmission into drive and pulling away from the curb. In this way General Twining had carefully orchestrated a complete cover-up of what had happened at Roswell as well as a full-scale, top-secret military R&D operation to identify the nature of the phenomenon and assess its military threat to the United States. It was as elegant as it was effective.
But the plan didn’t stop with the creation of the working group—in fact, the operation very quickly developed into something far more sophisticated because General Twining’s “flying discs” simply wouldn’t go away. As more information on sightings and encounters came rolling in through every imaginable channel, from police officers taking reports from frighten
ed civilians to airline pilots tracking strange objects in the sky, the group realized that they needed policies on how to handle what was turning into a mass-media phenomenon. They needed a mechanism for processing the thousands of flying saucer reports that could be anything from a real crash or close encounter to a couple of bohunks tossing a pie tin into the air and snapping its picture with their Aunt Harriet’s Kodak Brownie. The group also had to assess the threat from the Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries, assuming of course that flying saucers weren’t restricted to North America, and gather intelligence on what kinds of information our allies had on flying saucers as well. And it still had to process the Roswell technology and figure out how it could be used. So from the original group there developed a whole tree structure of loosely confederated committees and subgroups, sometimes complete organizations like the air force Project Blue Book, all kept separate by administrative firewalls so that there would be no information leakage, but all controlled from the top.
With the initial and ongoing stories safely covered up, the plans for the long-term reverse-engineering work on the Roswell technology could begin. But who would do it? Where would the material reside? And how could the camouflage of what the military was doing be maintained amidst the push for new weapons, competition with the Soviets, and the flying saucer mania that was sweeping the country in the late 1940s? General Twining had a plan for that, too.
The Day After Roswell Page 8
