Alien Intrusion Page 20
[35]Ibid., p. 395–397.
[36]Ibid.
[37]Ibid., in an article by Martin S. Kottmeyer, p. 553–562.
[38]Ibid.
[39]Keyhoe, Condon Report, Section V, Chapter 2: UFOs 1947–1968, cited in “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,”
[40]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by Martin S. Kottmeyer, p. 364.
[41]Ibid., p. 553–562.
[42]Ibid., in an article by Kevin D. Randle, p. 375–377.
[43]Ibid., attributed to Edward J. Ruppelt, cited in an article by Kevin D. Randle, p. 375–377.
[44]James W. Moseley, “Some New Facts about Flying Saucers Have Landed,” Saucer News, p. 6, October 1957, cited in Alnor, UFOs in the New Age, p. 89.
[45]Alnor, UFOs in the New Age, p. 87–89.
[46]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, in an article by David Stupple, p. 10–13.
[47]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 747–751.
[48]Philip J. Klass, The Condon Study, p. 378, cited in Alnor, UFOs in the New Age, p. 79.
[49]“Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,”
[50]Story, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 747–751.
6
Mysteries, Myths, Mayhem, and Money
Roswell — the holy grail of UFOlogy
RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region” proclaimed the local newspaper — the July 8, 1947 edition of the Roswell Daily Record. This was the first public airing for what became known as the “Roswell incident.” It has become the most written-about/watched and talked-about account of a UFO in history. Even people who have no particular interest in UFOlogy have usually heard about the events of June 1947, when a flying saucer allegedly crashed in New Mexico and the U.S. Air Force retrieved alien bodies. This popularity is due to the numerous books, movies, and television shows that the Roswell legend spawned. Recently, movie mogul Steven Spielberg married the Roswell tale with the modern paradigm of abductions and crop circle mysteries, resulting in a multi-million-dollar TV series called Taken. Although made for a relatively minor cable TV channel in the United States, the series won Emmy Awards and became the most-watched series ever for its particular channel. The Roswell “incident” is alive and well!
Early in June 1947, something fell onto a ranch operated (but not owned) by W.W. “Mac” Brazel. He first discovered the debris on or around June 14, ten days before Kenneth Arnold’s flying disks made major headlines all over the country. (Soon after Arnold’s report, flying objects were seen in 39 separate states.)
Brazel’s farm was located about 75 miles northeast of the town of Roswell. On a visit to nearby Corona, his relatives told him about the “flying saucer flap.” A few days later, he drove into Roswell to buy a new pickup truck, carrying with him several pieces of the debris. He visited the local sheriff, who, on inspecting the material, thought that it might have some military significance. Sheriff Wilcox duly phoned the local Roswell Army Air Base, where he spoke with Major Jesse Marcel. Thinking from the initial report that it might be a downed aircraft, Marcel’s commander, Colonel William Blanchard, ordered Marcel and counterintelligence officer Sheridan Cavitt out to Brazel’s ranch. On viewing the wreckage, Cavitt immediately thought it probably came from a weather balloon, but Marcel had other ideas. When they arrived back, Marcel woke his wife and son, Jesse Jr., who even today remembers his father talking about flying saucers.[1] On July 8 the public information office at the base made the announcement that they had recovered a flying disk. This created newspaper headlines — it was a sensation!
The July 8, 1947, issue of the Roswell Daily Record.
However, at the intervention of Brigadier General Roger Ramey, who had also inspected the wreckage, a press conference was soon held that included Marcel. The army announced that the fuss was over nothing more than a weather balloon, pieces of which were duly paraded for public display. Marcel didn’t agree with this conclusion, probably because this was unlike any weather balloon he had ever seen. It is evident that he thought it was a UFO. Prior to the press conference, a weather officer by the name of Irving Newton remembered seeing pieces of what he recognized as a weather balloon laid out in Ramey’s office. In the 1990s, Newton told investigators:
I remember Major Marcel chased me all around that room… . He kept saying things like, “Look how tough that 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 [see later in this chapter] 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 [radar] target. I think he was embarrassed as crazy and he would like to do anything to make that turn into a flying saucer.[2]
Despite Marcel’s efforts, the Roswell “incident” was dead in the water, at least for the next 30 years or so.[3]
Champions of the cause
In 1978, world-famous ETH proponent Stanton Friedman came across an acquaintance who introduced him to Jesse Marcel. Marcel revived his crashed saucer theory, and Friedman believed he finally had proof of a conspiracy that hid the truth. Marcel claimed that weather balloon material had been substituted for flying saucer wreckage for the 1947 press conference photos. More startling revelations were to come, and Roswell would now truly become an “incident.”
The Roswell Incident is the name of perhaps the most famous book written about the events of 1947. Penned by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, the book’s 1980 release revived and enlarged the ideas of an earlier 1950 book by alleged hoaxer Frank Scully, which claimed that the government had in its possession several flying saucers and over 30 alien bodies from different regions across the country. It is clear that Berlitz and Moore were inspired by the embellished works of Scully and probably by the enormous sales potential of the subject matter (Scully’s book caused a sensation when it was released). Friedman also assisted Berlitz and Moore with the early chapters of their book.
The author with a display at Roswell’s public airport. The “legend” is alive and well.
It should be mentioned that Berlitz, an occult writer, has also made a career out of embellishing stories and fashioning them into books. He has written books about the “Philadelphia Experiment” (in which he claims the U.S. government was dematerializing Navy warships and rematerializing them over vast distances — this became a major urban legend), the Bermuda Triangle, and the legend of Atlantis.
UFO investigator Kal K. Korff investigated some of the claims Berlitz and Moore were making for their Roswell book. One such claim was that over 75 witnesses had been interviewed in it. However, upon careful reading and research of their book, he could find the testimonies of only 25, of whom only 7 were firsthand witnesses of the wreckage.
Some of the other claims in The Roswell Incident were that:
• The recovered pieces were made of an unknown and unbreakable material. It would not tear, burn, or break.
• There were alien markings on the wreckage, perhaps writing or hieroglyphics.
• Alien bodies were recovered from the crash.
• The saucers from a nearby crash site were stored in a facility known as Hangar 18 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Over the ensuing years, more and more books have made even more spectacular claims. New witnesses have suddenly appeared, and on one occasion, secret documents turned up on a UFOlogist’s doorstep, containing information about a top-secret government organization called Majestic 12 (Majic 12 or MJ-12), which will be discussed later. As recently as the 1990s, there have been official government investigations into the incident, some 50 years after the original event.
An official investigation … yet again
Roswell refuses to die. The following includes detai
ls from a 1994 inquiry by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO). Congressman Steven Schiff, who had displayed a keen interest in UFO matters, generated this inquiry. The GAO was involved because it intended to conduct an independent audit of the Department of Defense’s policies and procedures with regard to the Roswell incident.
The inquiry reproduced text from the July 8 edition of the Roswell Daily Record — citing Brazel’s recollections about the discovery on his farm:
[The object] … might have been as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that is how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up, the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds. There was no sign of any metal in the area which night [sic] have been used for an engine and no sign of any propellers of any kind. Although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used. Brazel said that he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these.[4]
Note how Brazel’s original description fits the description of something more benign, like a weather balloon as claimed, although it didn’t resemble any he had seen previously. Subsequent interviews revealed that none of the witnesses ever claimed that the material was unbreakable. Incredibly, it was discovered that the hieroglyphics were nothing more than flower patterns and other markings on scotch tape manufactured by a toy company.
In 1989, a new witness by the name of Glenn Dennis came forward, claiming that he was working as a mortician the day the “saucer” wreckage arrived. This staggered his friends, who commented that he had made no previous mention of this in the 30 or so years they had known him. Dennis claimed seeing the bodies of dead aliens and taking part in an autopsy of them. It should be noted that Dennis spoke up only after the Roswell incident had achieved some notoriety. Skeptical investigators found considerable holes in his story; for example, he claimed to know people at the time of the incident who never worked on the base until after the events of 1947. He also talked about a nurse who supposedly assisted at the autopsies, but her name has never appeared on any records, and she has never been found to this day. This only served to deepen the mystery in the eyes of some, and she became known as the “disappearing nurse,” implying that she had probably been “done away with.” It would appear that Dennis’s memory is not quite as good as it should have been. After being discredited, he now declines interviews by skeptical investigators.
Another “star” witness who had memory problems was Frank Kaufmann, who claims he watched a UFO explode while he was monitoring a radar screen. He said that he was also part of the military team sent to retrieve the wreckage and alien bodies. Years later, famous skeptic Philip Klass grilled Kaufmann, who eventually confessed that he never trained as a radar operator. Several retired Air Force colonels who were stationed at Roswell have been interviewed in subsequent years. None knew anything about the storage of UFO debris or alien bodies.[5]
UFO writer Randall Fitzgerald comments on Major Jesse Marcel’s role in the whole affair:
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.[6]
So what really happened?
It should be remembered that when the base at Roswell made the announcement about a flying disk, the term had only been in use for a few days. What was a flying disk anyway? No one knew, but it did cause imaginations to run wild.
During the post-war period, technology grew at a rapid rate. America had the atomic bomb, and they knew that the Soviets possessed it as well. Official documents released only a few years ago have since shown that a very sensitive project, classified TOP SECRET 1A, was being conducted. It became known as Project Mogul. With similarities to Skyhook (Captain Mantell’s death and Major Donald Keyhoe’s investigation mentioned in the last chapter), it was a balloon array designed to reflect radar and also monitor acoustic emissions from around the world. To achieve this, it needed to float high in the stratosphere. With some 23 balloons in its array, the purpose of this mission was to detect suspected Soviet nuclear tests. The radar reflectors were basically large metal foil kites, made with sticks, called RAWIN targets. The toy company that manufactured the kites also used reinforcing tape to hold them together. The balloons, which were made of neoprene rubber, also carried low-frequency microphones, a sonobuoy, aluminum tubes, rings, and battery packs.
On June 4, 1947, Mogul flight 4 was launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field, New Mexico, not far southwest of Roswell. Some of the balloons burst as a result of exposure to the sun, and, as the battery power was depleted, the military lost contact with the array only 17 miles from its eventual crash site. Information about Project Mogul remained classified for over 40 years.[7]
All of this occurred before the age of rockets and satellites. Project Mogul was a forerunner of that technology and was quite a novel way of listening to the “enemy.” It was not advanced technology, so why was it top secret? Why couldn’t the government reveal the truth and avoid all of the speculation? Quite simply, the U.S. was worried that if the Soviets knew they were being spied upon, they would move their nuclear testing underground.
How could a collection of paper, sticks, foil, and rubber be mistaken for a flying saucer? Perhaps the official Government Accounting Office report sums it up:
Adding some measure of credibility to the claims that have arisen since 1978 is the apparent depth of research of some of the authors and the extent of their efforts. Their claims are lessened somewhat, however, by the fact that almost all their information came from verbal reports many years after the alleged incident occurred. Many of the persons interviewed were, in fact, stationed at, or lived near Roswell during the time in question, and a number of them claim military service. Most, however, related their stories in their older years, well after the fact. In other cases, the information provided is second or thirdhand [sic], having been passed through a friend or relative after the principal had died. What is uniquely lacking in the entire exploration and exploitation of the “Roswell Incident” is official positive documentary or physical evidence of any kind that supports the claims of those who allege that something unusual happened.[8]
Some years later, UFOlogist John Keel suggested that dummies (similar to crash test dummies) were thrown from high altitudes for research purposes, which he offers as an explanation for the alien bodies myth.
Historical documentation
has shown the complete lack of physical evidence for a crashed UFO and alien bodies at Roswell, as well as providing straightforward evidence of what did happen. When mysterious elements appear in an account, human beings seem capable of fabricating fantastic stories to embellish something they want to be true. But the yarn spinning went even further, as “the faithful” desired to keep the Roswell legend alive.
Men in Black, Hangar 18, and MJ-12
One of the claims of pro-ETH UFOlogists is that the Roswell “bodies,” and those mentioned in Scully’s book, were housed in a secret storage facility known as Hangar 18. (Hangar 18 was also the name of a popular movie that promoted a similar theme.) Originally thought to be located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the mysterious depot has “resurfaced” in a number of locations, including the similarly mysterious government facility known as Area 51 in Nevada. In UFOlogist folklore, the mention of Hangar 18 invokes the implication of a cover-up. The U.S. government has always denied its existence.