The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  That afternoon’s Roswell Daily Record front page story began: “The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer. According to information released by the department, over authority of Maj. J.A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered….” Nowhere in the press release was Col. Blanchard’s name mentioned, only Marcel’s. Blanchard either did not want to be associated with the most important discovery in human history, giving all credit to a subordinate, Jesse Marcel, or he wanted to distance himself from what he feared might turn out to be a public embarrassment.

  In a 1979 interview Marcel accused Walter Haut of having written the press release without authorization, an act for which “he was severely reprimanded” by superiors. Soon after the incident Haut reportedly resigned from the Air Force “for personal reasons.” Haut would confess in 1995 about the press release that “I cannot honestly remember whether I wrote it. How the colonel passed that information on to me I cannot honestly tell you. It was not that big a production at that time, in my mind.” So unaffected was Haut that his wife claims he never once mentioned a flying disk or the press release to her. News of this puzzling find shot up the Army Air Force chain of command, in many instances arriving through official channels after the military brass had heard reports of it on news broadcasts, which did not make them happy. On July 9, for instance, The Washington Post reported: “Officers at the Roswell, N.M. air base received a blistering rebuke from the Army A.F. Headquarters in Washington for announcing that a ‘flying disc’ had been found on a New Mexico ranch.” Eighth Army Air Force commander Brigadier Gen. Roger Ramey ordered Major Marcel to fly the debris to Fort Worth, Texas and present it before a press conference he had called to squelch the firestorm of media attention. In numerous interviews from 1978 until his death in 1986, Marcel maintained “there was half a B-29 full” of the crash debris o Fort Worth. Other officers on that flight have strenuously challenged this claim as a gross exaggeration. Robert R. Porter, the flight engineer of the B-29 flight carrying Marcel, filed an affidavit in 1991 describing the debris as being carried in three shoebox-sized packages and a triangle-shaped package, “all of which could have fit into the trunk of a car.”

  Once inside Gen. Ramey’s office the debris was laid out on the floor and inspected by a weather officer Ramey had called in, Warrant Officer Irving Newton. “I remember Major Marcel chased me all around that room,” Newton told investigators during the 1990s. “He kept saying things like, ‘look at how tough the metal is. Look at the strange markings on it.’ While I was examining the debris, Marcel was picking up pieces of the radar target sticks and trying to convince me that some notations on the sticks were alien writings. But I was adamant that it was a weather balloon with a RAWIN target. I think he was embarrassed as crazy and he would like to do anything to make that turn into a flying saucer.”

  Two news photos were taken of a sheepish-looking Marcel holding pieces of the weather balloon. At least three more shots were snapped of Gen. Ramey, dressed in his formal uniform, and his assistant, Col. Thomas DuBose, posing by similar pieces. Marcel would claim in 1979 that debris from an ordinary weather balloon had been substituted for the flying saucer wreckage in all the photos but one, which showed him “with pieces of the actual stuff we had found. It was not a staged photo. Later, they cleared out our wreckage and substituted some of their own. Then they allowed more photos. Those photos were taken while the actual wreckage was already on its way to Wright Field.”

  To test Marcel’s allegation, researchers have obtained original prints of the photos and conducted comparisons of the debris pictured in each. No differences were found because the debris is identical. Nor would there have been any reason to believe Gen. Ramey just happened to have remnants of a degraded weather balloon laying around to produce for the media in case a flying saucer cover story ever became necessary.

  An FBI teletype message on July 8, sent from the Dallas office to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, D.C., and released to UFO researchers in the 1970s, reads: “Major Curtan, Headquarters, Eighth Air Force telephonically advised this office that an object purporting to be a flying disc was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, this date. The disc is hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a balloon by cable, which was approximately twenty feet in diameter. Major Curtan further advised that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not (illegible) borne out this belief. Disc and balloon being transported to Wright Field by special plane for examination.”

  Once at Wright Field parts of the debris were quickly identified by Colonel Marcellus Duffy, a former project officer of Mogul, as being from a Mogul balloon flight. A similar identification was made at Andrews Army Air Field outside Washington, D.C., at the headquarters of the Army Air Forces Weather Service, which was located in the same building as the office of Major General Clements McMullen, Deputy Commander of Strategic Air Command, who had originally ordered Gen. Ramey to concoct a cover story to protect Project Mogul. No one at Roswell, and few at Wright Field, had a need-to-know access concerning Mogul, which meant that many high-ranking officers and their subordinates were left to speculate about what had happened and why it was cloaked in secrecy. Both Col. Blanchard and Gen. Ramey were probably uninformed about Mogul and the true significance of the crash debris. It could even be that top levels of the military wanted rumors of crashed saucers to spread as confusion for Soviet operatives known to be probing for American nuclear secrets.

  In 1994 the Secretary of the Air Force ordered an investigation of allegations that a conspiracy existed within the government to hide the crash of an alien spacecraft near Roswell. The officer placed in charge, Col. Richard Weaver, Director of Security and Special Program Oversight for the Secretary’s office, held the highest security clearance, as did the members of his staff, enabling them to examine all super-secret “black” programs that are kept from public scrutiny. Their search of records for references to Roswell, flying saucer debris, and alien bodies turned up nothing. “The morning reports (at the Roswell base) showed that the subsequent activities at Roswell during the month were mostly mundane and not indicative of any unusual high level ac tivity,” their report concluded. Nor was any indication found “of heightened activity anywhere else in the military hierarchy in July 1947. If some event happened that was one of the ‘watershed happenings’ in human history, the U.S. military certainly reacted in an unconcerned and cavalier manner.”

  A similar investigation was conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office using employees holding high security clearances. Army Counterintelligence Corps historical files 1947-49, and National Security Council meeting minutes for 1947-48 were reviewed and no mention of Roswell or a crash was found. All CIA databases were searched against the term Roswell and no documents relating to a crash or bodies were uncovered. Also, records of Air Materiel Command at Wright Field from 1947 to 1950 were reviewed and GAO “found no records mentioning the Roswell crash or the examination by Air Materiel Command personnel of any debris recovered from the crash.”

  A series of declassified military documents from 1947 and 1948, all once classified Secret, reveal that not only did the Air Force have no pieces of an extraterrestrial vehicle, it was an agency increasingly frustrated at being unable to find physical evidence for the reality of flying saucers. Among these documents:

  Sept. 23, 1947— A letter by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining at Wright Field bemoaning “the lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits…”

  Dec. 22, 1947—An analysis of UFO reports by Maj. Gen. George McDonald, Director of Air Force Intelligence, declaring “physical evidence, such as crash-recovered exhibits, is not available…”

  Nov. 8, 1948—A letter by Col. H.M. McCoy, chief of intelligence at Wright Field’s Air Materiel Command, concluding “t
he exact nature of those objects cannot be established until physical evidence, such as that which would result from a crash, has been obtained.”

  Commercial airline pilot Kent Jeffrey spent several years financing his own personal investigation of Roswell and whether any wreckage or bodies ended up in storage at Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson. He tracked down and interviewed three retired Air Force colonels who served at Wright-Patterson in the 1950s and 1960s with the Foreign Technology Division, which would have handled any crash debris if it existed. None of the three knew anything about UFO debris or alien bodies. “If something like that had happened, I would have known about it,” declared George Weinbrenner, the commander of the Foreign Technology Division from 1968-74. For Jeffrey these three sources provided him with “the final confirmation—no alien bodies, no secret hangar, and no UFO crash at Roswell. Case closed.”

  A combination of human foibles coalesced to create the modern myth of what happened near Roswell, including a contagion of rumormongering, miscommunication, misperception, exaggerations, self-aggrandizing behavior, lies for financial gain, and a psychological condition called false memories. There has been a tendency for second and thirdhand witnesses to pass on rumor and speculation, a case in point being retired Gen. Arthur Exon, who was a lieutenant colonel at Wright Field in 1947. Exon told Karl Pflock that his information about saucer wreckage and alien bodies was “nothing more than rumors he had heard.” Similarly, Exon admitted to Stanton Friedman that he “had heard scuttlebutt about bodies and wreckage, but had no firsthand knowledge of the subject.”

  For a sad case of apparent exaggeration we need look no further than Major Jesse Marcel. UFO researchers Robert Todd and Kal Korff independently obtained Marcel’s nearly 200-page long military service file and found, in Korff s words, a pattern of Marcel “exaggerating things and repeatedly trying to write himself into the history books.” Marcel had told book authors that he held a college bachelor’s degree, had been a pilot of B-24s in World War II, received five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft, and was himself shot down. Yet absolutely none of this was true according to his own service file! Marcel frequently changed his testimony about the Roswell debris. First he said he had heard about someone trying to dent the metal with a hammer, then later he said “we even tried making a dent in it with a 16-pound sledge hammer, still no dent in it.” Sometimes he said the debris “didn’t burn very well,” and then other times he claimed it would not burn at all. Marcel’s career lasted less than three years after his humiliation at Roswell, when he resigned to open a small-town TV repair shop. Gene Tighe worked under Marcel at Strategic Air Command in Washington, D.C. Says Tighe, who ended his own career as a general: “Marcel’s reputation suffered dramatically at SAC” in the aftermath of Roswell.

  Frank Kaufmann claims he watched a UFO explode on a radar screen, and he was part of the military team sent to retrieve the wreckage and alien bodies. The supposed site of the UFO explosion was more than 100 miles from the radar unit Kaufmann said he was assigned to, yet radar in 1947 had an effective range of no more than 40 miles. Under intense grilling by aerospace writer Philip J. Klass in the 1990s, Kaufmann confessed that he was never a trained radar operator. As for the site north of Roswell where Kaufmann says the UFO crashed, an affidavit was sworn out in 1997 by Jim McKnight, whose aunt owned the land in question, stating that “no one in my family had any knowledge of such a UFO crash or military retrieval.” McKnight emphasized that any military team entering the alleged crash area would have passed within sight of his family’s ranch house. A final nail in Kaufmann’s tale comes from his claim of having a diary from 1947 verifying his involvement in a crash recovery. He has refused all requests to produce the diary and submit it to forensic testing to substantiate its age.

  James Ragsdale professed that he and a girlfriend saw the spacecraft crash and they examined the alien bodies. His first rendering of the incident surfaced in 1993 in the form of a notarized statement describing how he and the woman investigated the crash north of Roswell at sunrise, watching from a distance as the military recovered the craft and bodies. He managed to keep some of the flying saucer debris, pieces that looked like carbon paper 18-30 inches long. But in 1951 his car was stolen with a few saucer pieces in it, and in 1985 his house was broken into and thieves stole the rest of the spacecraft. Two years after this account Ragsdale significantly altered his story. On a videotape made five days before his death from lung cancer, he changed the crash location to Boy Scout Mountain, due west from Roswell. This time he said they had visited the crash immediately that night, not the next morning. Ragsdale said he even tried to pry the helmet off a dead alien to take home as a souvenir. Philip Klass discovered how this fresh version of Ragsdale’s story was then being marketed to benefit Ragsdale’s family, with The Roswell International UFO Museum selling a 42-page booklet, The Jim Ragsdale Story, for $14.95, a one-hour video with the same title for $29.50, and T-shirts picturing the new “Jim Ragsdale Impact Site” for $13.95 each.

  Retired Army officer Philip Corso claims he was in charge of “seeding” alien technology harvested from the Roswell saucer, a modern Johnny Appleseed handing out advanced secrets to select American defense contractors. These and a myriad of other claims come packaged in his book, The Day After Roswell, the circumstances of whose release in June 1997 raised initial questions about Corso’s integrity and credibility. The first edition of the book carried a brief foreward by U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praising Corso for service to his country. It turned out that Corso had apparently misled Thurmond, submitting an entirely different book manuscript, Corso’s memoirs called I Walked With Giants, for the senator to comment on, with no mention made of UFOs or government conspiracies. Thurmond protested loudly and publicly, forcing removal of the foreword from subsequent editions.

  Inside the Roswell book Corso reprinted four UFO photographs he alleges were taken from “Army Intelligence files as support material for the R&D project to harvest the Roswell alien technology for military purposes.” Karl Pflock, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, points out that all four photos have been in the public domain for decades. One shows a 1935 Ford hubcap thrown into the air over Riverside, California, in 1953. The other three photos are all lifted from the 1968 Condon Committee report for the Air Force on UFOs, picturing such phenomena as, in Pflock’s words, “a smoke ring generated by a simulated atom bomb demonstration in 1957.”

  A cursory examination of Corso’s book reveals a host of errors, unsubstantiated claims, and blatant misrepresentations. Corso depicts Major Jesse Marcel as being in charge of the removal of alien bodies from the spacecraft, whereas Marcel always insisted he never saw alien bodies, nor did he know anyone who had. Corso says the recovered alien craft is being stored at Norton AFB, seemingly unaware Norton has been closed for years. Corso claims he and the Army developed Corona, the world’s first spy satellite program, to detect UFO landings. Pflock counters that Corona “was a 100 percent CIA-Air Force project, and the army had nothing to do with it.” Corso writes that the B-2 stealth bomber was a Lockheed project, when anyone familiar with aviation knows it is a Northrop creation. The list goes on and on.

  Television reporter George Knapp has known Corso since 1992, interviewing him on numerous occasions. According to Knapp, Corso “has a tough-to-swallow story about an encounter with a live alien in the New Mexico desert, in which the alien being telepathically communicated a strange message.” Apparently that Corso experience proved too far out even for this book as it does not appear. In an interview with CNI News, a UFO reporting service, a glimpse emerged of what may be motivating Corso—beyond the considerable financial reward—to sacrifice his reputation within mainstream military and political circles. Boasting of his exploits in World War II, Corso says he personally spirited 10,000 Jewish refugees out of Rome to Palestine. “I thought nothing of it,” comments Corso, “but p
eople said what a big thing it was.” Now with revelations of his role in saving Earth from the threat of alien invasion, maybe humankind will recognize and appreciate, perhaps even worship, Philip Corso who by his own modest admission has “changed the course of the world.”

  Glenn Dennis worked as a Roswell mortician and first came forward in 1989 with his story of being at the base on the day saucer wreckage and bodies arrived. Friends who had known Dennis for decades were surprised and incredulous when he spoke up. Walter Haut remembers thinking “what the heck would he know?” since Dennis had never mentioned this experience in three decades of friendship. A review of Roswell base daily personnel accounting records by Air Force investigators in 1996 found Dennis’ account “grossly inaccurate” with “serious errors in his recollection of events.” A pediatrician Dennis fingered as involved in the 1947 events did not serve in Roswell until 1951-53, and did not recall ever knowing Dennis. Also Dennis had told of a “black sergeant” and a “big redheaded captain” who threatened him at the base hospital where alien bodies were allegedly being autopsied. Racial integration in the armed forces did not occur until 1949, and only one tall officer with red hair matching Dennis’ description served at Roswell, but not until 1954. Dennis claimed he spoke with a nurse in that period named Captain Wilson, yet roster reviews found just one nurse named Wilson, who did not arrive until 1956.

  Another nurse whose name Dennis gave as Naomi Selff, and who supposedly told Dennis about participating in an alien autopsy, also could not be located on rosters or in military records for any time frame. In 1995 Karl Pflock asked Dennis if he had made up the nurse’s name. “No, no way. I’ve never done that,” Dennis replied. Just a few months later Dennis conceded that he had lied. The name was fictitious and he had swore an oath not to reveal her actual identity. There were additional problems with his testimony. In early interviews he said MPs had merely walked with him out of the base hospital and away from the alien bodies inside. Several years passed and Dennis was telling the story this way: “These two MPs grabbed me by the arms and carried me clear outside. I didn’t walk, they carried me!” As for those baby caskets Dennis says the base wanted, presumably to hold alien bodies, it turns out that infant coffins were used by officers at Roswell to transport whiskey and other alcohol on airplanes, a smuggling technique they learned to foil enlisted men from pilfering the goods.