Charles

BERLITZ & William L. MOORE

THE ROSWELL INCIDENT

Crosset & Dunlap NY, 1980
Contents
Introduction
1 UFOs in the Sky and in Space
2 Incident at Roswell
3 The AAF Confronts a Crashed UFO and Dead Extraterrestrials
4 Witnesses Speak-the Town Remembers
5 Descriptions of the Aliens
6 Holes in the Cover-up
7 The President and the Captured Saucer
8 "Top Secret" Forever-the AVRO Alternative
9 The Russian Connection
Footnotes
Bibliography

Introduction
According to UFO legend, an extraterrestrial spaceship crashed in New Mexico
in the early days of July 1947. This would seem to be, on the surface, simply
another report that has been kept alive in UFO journals and the thousands of
books written about UFOs in all languages. What is different about this case,
however, is the vitality of this one single incident and its continuing
developments in scientific, government, and legal circles.

At the time this book goes to press a civil action has been brought by concerned
parties, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, through their attorneys, against the CIA
for the purpose of releasing information about crashed UFOs in accord with the
terms of the Freedom of Information Act. CAUS, in addition, has taken over a
previous suit of the Ground Saucer Watch against the CIA. Among the charges
brought by the suits are suppression of media information, withholding of files,
muzzling of witnesses, and, in general, hiding information through the use of
now unnecessary security classification.

Events which had been reported in the press and by radio before security
regulations were imposed by the Army Air Force (whose name was changed to
the Air Force in that very year, 1947) indicate that material from the wrecked
UFO was shuttled by high-security government transportation from base to base
and that the remains of the UFO and the dead occupants (one of whom was
reportedly alive when found) are under high-security guard at CIA headquarters
at Langley, Virginia.

Those of us who can recall the years before 1947, which was the year of the first
well-publicized saucer "invasion," remember reading purportedly factual
accounts about what might have been called saucers long before they became
popular. These were puzzling reports, carried in meteorological and
astronomical journals, containing references to giant airborne objects in the night
sky, neither airships nor meteors.

An example from the Monthly Weather Review (March 1904): Lieutenant Frank
H. Schofield, commanding the U.S.S. Supply, reported that he and his crew on
February 24, 1904, had clearly viewed three enormous luminous objects moving
in unison across the night sky, far at sea in the Atlantic, with the largest of them
having a diameter six times that of the sun.
In like vein the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (March
1913) carried a compilation of reports by Professor Chant of Toronto about
unidentified flying objects crossing east to west along the U.S.-Canadian border
at a time that subsequent checks revealed no "human" airships had been aloft
that night. The reports, gathered from a great number of observers along the
route, agreed that a huge luminous body traveled straight across the sky, that the
"body was composed of three or four parts with a tail to each part" and as it
disappeared a second and third grouping followed. "There were probably thirty
or thirty-two such bodies during the period of an hour... they moved in fours,
threes, and twos, abreast of one another. So perfect was this line-up that it
seemed almost as if an aerial fleet were maneuvering..."

There were other reports of UFOs prior to 1947 but they were relatively few
compared to the many thousands that have since found their way into the world
press, radio, and television. (There are reported to be 10,000 pages of classified
UFO documents in CIA headquarters alone.) The increasing flood of these
reports points up a pertinent fact: The frequency of UFO sightings increases in
direct proportion to our scientific and technological development. Radar
installations which detect UFOs are an additional check to visual observations,
while increasing numbers of plane flights bring pilots and sometimes passengers
into startling proximity to unidentified flying objects, and astronauts frequently
encounter them in space, all of which are comparatively recent developments.

Nevertheless, extreme interest in UFOs is still considered something of an

aberration, possibly because no concrete proof of any such craft is known to
have been found or identified as such. In effect there is no corpus delecti.

If there were and if it had been found in territory controlled by any of the great
powers or even of some of the lesser powers it would, quite understandably,
have been covered up until the national authorities in question decided what to
do about it or how to make it serve their own interests and purposes.

This is possibly the explanation of the Roswell Incident. However, far from
being just an interesting mystery, one that has had its day in the press and then
subsided, the Roswell Incident is still going on. According to reports, the
remains of the craft are still being studied (perhaps with a view to duplication),
research is continuing on the composition of the unfamiliar metallic (and other)
portions of the space vehicle, unidentifiable hieroglyphic figures reportedly
discovered on the interior controls are being subject to computer breakdown, and
the cell and internal structure of the humanoid though alien crew members is still
the cell and internal structure of the humanoid though alien crew members is still
undergoing medical analysis. From a public interest point of view, new
statements from witnesses, and the families of witnesses who were previously
unwilling to make statements, and "afterthoughts" from some of the military
personnel involved in the cover-up present in the following pages rather
convincing proof that this crash of a space ship was definitely not a mass
delusion but an actual event.

Since the space age began it has often been suggested that we of the human race
of earth are on the brink of making contact with some of our neighbors in the
cosmos and obtaining final proof that ours is not the only life form in our galaxy.
Perhaps this already happened in New Mexico in 1947 and only now, with the
discovery of new information and the eventual help of the Freedom of
Information Act, will the consequences become apparent.
1 UFOs in the Sky and in Space
UFOs were really never new. Throughout history, whenever men watched the
heavens, they saw or believed they saw flying figures, signs, portents, gods,
angels, devils, ships, and, in recent times, having lost an earlier faith, they have
seen types of aircraft that apparently come from no earthly base. We have no
way of calculating how many of these visions have been caused by
misinterpretation or a productive imagination. However, if even 20 percent of
these sightings are without earthly explanation, as has been suggested by the
data in Air Force Project Blue Book, Special Report No. 14, then there must
have been millions of unexplained visitors to the skies of earth since the human
species first began to record their impressions of celestial visitors.

In ancient and medieval times portents and objects in the sky were taken more or
less as a matter of fact, perhaps because there was no known human air traffic at
the time with which to confuse them. From ancient Egypt we have a record that
describes huge fiery circles coming from the evening sky, menacing Pharaoh as
he stood in a chariot at the head of his army, maintaining throughout the
incident, however, a commendable though puzzled sang-froid. The prophet
Ezekiel may have had dealings with one and with its captain, whom he believed
to be the Lord. A reading of the Book of Ezekiel contains an excellent
description of the landing of a space capsule, described in simple and
understandable language. The ancient skies seemed to be filled with aerial
travelers. The Assyrians saw flying bulls, ancient Greeks and Arabs saw flying
horses, the opulent Persians thought they saw flying carpets, the warlike Romans
watched flying shields and spears and whole battles in the sky at the very
moment that they themselves were engaged in earthly combat.

As the ancient world became Christianized, the aerial sightings became fiery
crosses and other threatening signs of doom foretelling plagues and disasters.
The Emperor Constantine of Byzantium saw something in the sky before a battle
that convinced him to become a Christian, considerably changing thereby the
course of history.

When the Renaissance opened up people's minds to the exploration of the world,
UFOs appropriately took the forms of galleys and caravels, and then, as the
French first began experimenting with balloons, certain vast globes were seen
floating in the upper heavens, almost as monstrous reflections of what the
French were doing. Starting in the late 1800s, relatively modern observers have
French were doing. Starting in the late 1800s, relatively modern observers have
described UFOs as flying spindles, cigars, and then airships moving at
tremendous speeds. In World Wars I and II they were taken to be some sort of
unexplained weapon (World War II: "foo fighters") which each side thought the
other was using, and it was not until 1947 that the greatly increased number
ofUFO sightings (at first described as metallic discs or pie pans) were given the
name of "flying saucers."

It is possible that all these sightings throughout history, and to an increasing

extent in the present, are all versions of the same phenomenon, aided perhaps by
imagination and a penchant for seeing what one expects to see. This is why the
Chinese have long thought that they have seen hurtling and luminous dragons;
the ancient Hindus, two-and three-decked aerial chariots; the Indians of the
Americas, great canoes; and tribes and nations in all parts of the earth, luminous
monsters, demons, and gods.

But we cannot predicate a mass delusion, especially in a world where many

heads of state among the developed nations as well as the highest officials of the
United Nations, leading scientists, astronomers, and by now the majority of the
earth's population are convinced that we are regularly being visited by UFOs.
They appear over large cities, seen by hundreds of thousands. They land near TV
stations and power plants and are suspected of having caused the great power
blackout of 1965. They buzz passenger planes and are reported to have
destroyed military ones. They regularly haunt our advanced research and space-
shot centers and follow our capsules into the cosmos. So convinced are large
numbers of people about the hovering presence of UFOs that an airfield in
France is permanently reserved for their landing, its blue landing lights an
invitation only to landing craft not of this earth.

With the breaking of the space barrier it appears that astronauts from earth have
begun to meet UFOs in space. If we consider reports that the majority of space
ventures have encountered UFOs then the percentage of encounters is vastly
greater in space than in the skies of earth. This would seem definitely to indicate
that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin and, far from being supernatural, are
possibly space probes, patrols, or other activity frequently pointed in the
direction of earth, an activity antedating our own space efforts over a period of
thousands or even millions of years.

While much has been written about UFO sightings and encounters on earth, little
has been openly written about encounters with UFOs in space exploration. A
has been openly written about encounters with UFOs in space exploration. A
rather convincing indication of the presence of UFOs in earth space (but how far
out do our space boundaries extend?) has been furnished by mathematician,
physicist, and author Maurice Chatelain, a designer of the Apollo spacecraft and
former chief of the NASA Communications for the Apollo lunar missions and an
outspoken documentalist of one special phase of close encounters in space by
explorers (U.S.) from earth with entities from elsewhere. According to
Chatelain's accounts, some of which are based on information picked up from
"inside sources" while working for NASA in the 1960s, and other relying on
data passed on to him later by friends and former colleagues, reports of these
encounters made during flights in space have generally been censored, altered,
de-emphasized, or simply ignored by NASA and therefore never reached the
public at the time of their occurrence. The fact that the astronauts were on
military duty was, according to Chatelain, a great and perhaps planned
advantage for secrecy inasmuch as they could simply be ordered not to discuss
aspects of their UFO encounters. Although the majority of U.S. astronauts are no
longer on active duty, they have steadfastly maintained a discreet silence on this
topic right up to the present day, leaving us with only Chatelain's "inside"
accounts to hint at what might really have gone on in space and even over the
surface of the moon. These, to say the least, are visibly impressive...

Additional confirmation that the Apollo 11 astronauts had indeed experienced

some strange moments on their five-day flight to the moon and back comes from
a source apparently associated with Anglia TV in London. According to this
source, NASA was forced to change the originally intended landing site for the
Eagle lander module because it was discovered that the first site was "crawling"-
presumably with somebody else's space hardware. As evidence, the Anglia
source cites the following allegedly "deleted" bit of conversation, obtained
through an unnamed intermediary, purported to have taken place between
astronaut Colonel Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and NASA Mission Control sometime
prior to the lunar landing on July 20, 1969.

Aldrin: What was it?... What the hell was it? That's all I want to know.

Mission Control: What's there?... [garbled malfunction]... Mission Control

calling Apollo 11 ...

Aldrin: These babies were huge, sir... enormous... Oh God, you wouldn't believe
it!... I'm telling you there are other spacecraft out here... lined up on the far side
of the crater edge.... They're on the moon watching us. ...
Although several of the astronauts have flatly denied experiencing UFO
sightings in space, and NASA is reported to have dismissed one of its employees
for allegedly selling "falsified tape recordings" of conversations similar to the
one above, Chatelain maintains that his information is of the most reliable sort
and has published this information in his books in France, England, and the
United States. (See Bibliography) In his words: "All Apollo or Gemini flights
were followed, both at a distance and sometimes... quite closely, by space
vehicles of extraterrestrial origin. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed
Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence."

And, of course, these sightings do not include Russian sightings and alleged
observations by both Russian and American astronauts of ruins, constructions,
and "pyramids" on the moon which may or may not have bearings on present
UFO activity. It indicates, however, a lively curiosity in our own space activities
on the part of entities unknown. Besides these meetings in the cosmos there are
sightings, close and distant, by thousands of chance observers on earth as they
watch the skies by night or by day. There are persistent though difficult-to-verify
reports of cosmic kidnapings wherein startled human beings have been taken
aboard UFOs, kept there, questioned, brainwashed, and then released, generally
with memory and especially time lapses, because of which what seemed a few
minutes to them has been several days in earth time. Disappearances of people in
isolated locations, unexplained deaths, and draining of blood from animals have
frequently been blamed on UFOs-a convenient target-as if they were scouting
the earth like a gigantic game preserve for food or specimens.

In spite of the ubiquity and frequency of UFO sightings and alleged encounters,
as of this moment there is no concrete evidence available that they exist and that
they are not in some way natural phenomena, as for example, glowing swamp
gas, refractions of starlight, swarms of insects that generate electricity, or visual
retention of the image of the moon or of stars -rather imaginative explanations,
themselves worthy of some of the more picturesque UFO reports. Also, many of
the more carefully documented UFO "encounter" reports come from ranchers,
truck drivers, state troopers, sheriffs, and others whose duties normally take
them out into the lonely spaces of night. (The incidents in the film Close
Encounters of the Third Kind were based on reported UFO happenings.) But if
extraterrestrials on board UFOs wished to make contact with the human race,
why would they select relatively unimportant individuals instead of landing at
the seats of power, such as in the center court of the Pentagon, in the middle of
Red Square, or in front of the Tien-an-men Gate, for more direct summit
conversations?
conversations?

It is of course natural for scientists, and especially for astronomers, to exercise

an understandable caution in approaching a subject which, however popular,
remains devoid of positive acceptance. One astronomer (nameless of course)
quoted in Dr. Peter Sturrock's Report on Survey of the Membership of the
American Astronomers Society Concerning the UFO Problem (Stanford, 1975)
speaks for the majority: "...I find it tough to make a living as an astronomer these
days. It would be professionally suicidal to devote significant time to UFOs..."

Throughout the world, as far as is available to public knowledge, no definite

proof exists that UFOs are a product of individual or mass hypnotism. Even
though we know that pilots have disappeared or died while chasing or being
chased by a UFO they are still presumed by most scientists and astronomers to
have been victims of their own imaginations.

Just suppose, however, that one of these "imaginary" UFOs made a crash
landing at a place that could be reached by Air Force or other investigative
teams. Suppose, moreover, that it would be in sufficient repair to be identified as
a UFO and would contain fairly intact though dead humanoid extraterrestrials
within the capsule. There would be indications of writing on the control pahel
and on a parchment-like substance scattered around, and the writing would later
prove to be of no earthly language. If this happened, it would considerably
strengthen the belief in extraterrestrial life and advanced technology but, at the
same time, present the government of the country where it landed with a
problem of how to deal with the happening-whether to share it (with the possible
secret of its operation) with the world or to deny that it ever happened.

A number of elements in the above science-fiction scenario were rather

convincingly carried out in New Mexico some years ago. The first scene could
be titled as follows:

Place: The teletype room of Radio КО AT, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Time: July 7, 1947, at four o'clock in the afternoon.
2 Incident at Roswell
Lydia Sleppy, who, in addition to her other office and administrative duties for
radio station KOAT in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was also the teletype
operator, was sitting at her machine at the station at approximately 4 P.M. The
date was July 7, 1947. Suddenly the phone rang with a message that would affect
news reports for the next few days throughout the world, and whose import may
not yet be fully apparent. The call was from Johnny McBoyle, reporter and part
owner of sister station KSWS in Roswell, New Mexico-a station which had no
teletype of its own but which frequently used the KOAT machine when it had
something to report. This time his voice was excited:

"Lydia, get ready for a scoop! We want to get this on the ABC wire right away.
Listen to this! A flying saucer has crashed... No, I'm not joking. It crashed near
Roswell. I've been there and seen it. It's like a big crumpled dishpan. Some
rancher has hauled it under a cattle shelter with his tractor. The Army is there
and they are going to pick it up. The whole area is now closed off. And get this-
they're saying something about little men being on board.... Start getting this on
the teletype right away while I'm on the phone."

Understandably bemused, Lydia placed the phone in the uncomfortable position

between ear and shoulder and started to type McBoyle's startling statements into
the teletype. But after she had typed only several sentences the machine
suddenly stopped itself. As this is a common occurrence with teletypes for a
variety of reasons, Lydia was not concerned, although she had never been cut off
the air before in the middle of a transmission. Moving the telephone from her
neck to her hand, she informed McBoyle that the teletype had stopped at her end.

This time, according to her recollections, he seemed not only excited but under
pressure and apparently speaking to someone else at the same time. His voice
seemed strained. "Wait a minute, I'll get back to you.... Wait.... I'll get right
back." But he did not. Instead the teletype went on again by itself and started
addressing Albuquerque, or Lydia, directly. The sender was not identified and
the tone was formal and curt: ATTENTION ALBUQUERQUE: DO NOT
TRANSMIT. REPEAT DO NOT TRANSMIT THIS MESSAGE. STOP
COMMUNICATION IMMEDIATELY.

As Lydia still had McBoyle on the phone she told him what had just come over
the teletype and asked: "What do I do now?"
the teletype and asked: "What do I do now?"

His reply was unexpected. "Forget about it. You never heard it. Look, you're not
supposed to know. Don't talk about it to anyone."

(McBoyle later told Lydia Sleppy that he had witnessed a plane, which he said
was destined for Wright Field-Wright-Patterson-take off with the object or parts
of it on board, but was unable to get anywhere near it because of the tight
security maintained by heavily armed guards.)

Although this was Lydia's last connection with the "happening" she had ample
time for subsequent reflection about it, since it was to become a topic of
considerable discussion after the return of her boss, Merle Tucker, who had been
out of town at the time of the occurrence. Tucker was concerned that his station's
involvement in the incident could jeopardize his recent application for an FCC
license for a subsidiary station he was preparing to add to his Rio Grande
Broadcasting Network. What particularly bothered him was that, try as he could,
he was totally unable to verify that the incident had actually taken place.

Especially interesting, however, is that many of the people he tried to talk to

about it insisted that the object had come down in the area west of Socorro, New
Mexico, rather than near Roswell, and that a sheriff's deputy from that town had
been to the spot and had viewed the wreckage of some sort of saucer-shaped
object along with a small burned patch of ground. "Then all of a sudden," he
recalled in a recent interview, "we couldn't find anything or anyone who would
talk about it." Tucker himself, while he vividly recalled the incident, was
reluctant to be interviewed about the matter, and absolutely refused to allow the
interview to be taped. Nuclear physicist and researcher Stanton T. Friedman met
with a similar wall of silence when he located and tried to interview McBoyle on
the same topic. McBoyle's reaction: "Forget about it. ... It never happened."

It probably occurred to Lydia, as it did to other area residents and investigators,

that the incident was most likely concerned with the reported presence of "flying
saucers" (not yet referred to as UFOs) which seemed to be operating in force in
the area of New Mexico and Arizona during June and July 1947. This was,
incidentally, relatively close in time to the June 24 sighting of the famous flight
of nine "pie pans" over Mount Rainier, Washington, by Kenneth Arnold-a
spectacular sighting which initiated the first intensive public interest in UFOs
and led to the general use of the term flying saucers to describe them.

These subsequent reports indicated a swirling UFO activity by night and by day
These subsequent reports indicated a swirling UFO activity by night and by day
in Arizona and New Mexico-an activity easily justified by the fact that in the late
1940s New Mexico was the site of the major portion of America's postwar
defense efforts in atomic research, rocketry, aircraft and missile development,
and radar-electronics experimentation. Los Alamos, the sprawling scientific
community created by the Manhattan Project in 1943 especially to provide the
manpower and facilities necessary for the wartime construction and testing of
the world's first atomic bombs, was still a "secret city" in 1947-a highly
restricted area. Of similar status was the White Sands Missile Range and Proving
Grounds around Alamogordo, where top-level research was being curried out on
the only captured German V-2 rockets in existence on our side of the Iron
Curtain. Also stationed in New Mexico, at Roswell, was the only combat-trained
atom-bomb group in the world at that time-the 509th Bomb Group of the U.S.
Army Air Force. All of which makes it somewhat easier to understand why, in
those summer months of 1947, New Mexico experienced more UFO sightings
both per capita and per square mile than any other state in the union. Certainly
alien intelligences systematically engaged in the observation of this planet and
its civilization could be expected to concentrate their efforts on monitoring those
areas exhibiting the highest levels of scientific and technological activity.

The following reports are not only typical but are of special interest because of
the sighters' ability to describe the shape (difficult to do, especially by night) of
what they saw:

June 25, 1947: A saucer-shaped object about one half the size of the full moon
was reported moving south over Silver City, New Mexico, by the local dentist,
Dr. R. F. Sensenbaugher.

June 26, 1947: Leon Oetinger, M.D., of Lexington, Kentucky, and three other
witnesses reported a large, silver, ball-shaped object-clearly not a balloon or a
dirigible-traveling at high speed near the edge of the Grand Canyon.

June 27, 1947: John A. Petsche, an electrician at Phelps-Dodge Corporation, and

other witnesses reported a disc-shaped object overhead and apparently coming to
earth about 10:30 A.M. near Tintown in the vicinity of Bisbee in southeastern
Arizona near the New Mexico border.

June 27, 1947: Major George B. Wilcox of Warren, Arizona, reported a series of
eight or nine perfectly spaced discs traveling at high speed with a wobbling
motion. He said the discs passed over his house at three-second intervals heading
motion. He said the discs passed over his house at three-second intervals heading
east, and estimated them to be at a height of about 1,000 feet above the
mountaintops.

June 27, 1947: A "white disc glowing like an electric light bulb" was reported to
have passed over Pope, New Mexico, by local resident W. C. Dobbs at 9:50
A.M. Minutes later, the same or a similar object was sighted traveling southwest
over the White Sands Missile Range by Captain E. B. Detchmendy, who
reported it to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harold R. Turner. At
10:00 A.M., Mrs. David Appelzoller of San Miguel, New Mexico, reported that
a similar object had passed over that city, again heading southwest. Colonel
Turner of White Sands initially reacted by announcing that no rockets had been
launched from that base since June 12. Later, fearing hysteria, he officially
"identified" the object as a "daytime meteorite" (sic).

June 28, 1947: Captain F. Dvyn, a pilot flying in the vicinity of Alamogordo,
New Mexico, witnessed "a ball of fire with a fiery blue trail behind it" pass
beneath his aircraft and appear to disintegrate while he watched.

June 29, 1947: Army Air Force pilots conducted a search for an object reported
to have fallen near Cliff, New Mexico, sometime in the forenoon, but find
nothing but a curious odor in the air.

June 29, 1947: A team of naval rocket-test experts headed by Dr. C. J. Zohn, on
duty at the White Sands Proving Grounds, watched a silvery-colored disc do a
series of maneuvers at high altitude over the secret rocket-test range.

June 30, 1947: Thirteen silvery disc-shaped objects were observed by a railroad
worker named Price traveling one after another over Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Initially heading south, they changed course abruptly to east, and then reversed
dramatically to west before disappearing. Price alerted his neighbors, and the
entire neighborhood rushed out of their houses to lie on their lawns and observe
the maneuvers in the sky above them.

June 30, 1947 (as reported from the Tucumcari [New Mexico] Daily News on
July 9): "Mrs. Helen Hardin, employee of Quay County Abstract Co., reported
Tuesday, July 8, that she saw a flying saucer from her front porch about 11 P.M.
June 30 traveling from east to west at high speed. She said it looked to be about
half the size of the full moon with a slight yellow cast. She watched it for about
six seconds, low in the sky and going down outside of town rather than close in.
She at first thought it was a meteor but noticed a whirling motion as it neared the
She at first thought it was a meteor but noticed a whirling motion as it neared the
ground. Also it was not falling as fast as meteors do."

July 1, 1947: Max Hood, an executive of the Albuquerque Chamber of

Commerce, reported seeing a bluish disc zigzagging across the northwestern sky
over Albuquerque.

July 1-6, 1947: Seven separate reports of flying discs over northern Mexico
ranging from Mexicali to Juarez.

July 1, 1947: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Munn reported witnessing a large object
moving east over Phoenix about 9:00 P.M.

July 2, 1947: Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot of Roswell, New Mexico, witnessed a
large, glowing object as it passed over their house traveling northwest at a high
rate of speed. (See Chapter 3)

What were these people seeing? Certainly not tests of the high-flying V-2 model
rockets being flown from White Sands at the time, as some skeptics have
suggested. A check of the White Sands records shows that the only V-2 tests
conducted anywhere near the time frame in question were one on June 12 and
another on July 3.

It would be easy to suggest that these sightings, coming after the well-publicized
Mount Rainier reports, were auto-induced optical suggestions by witnesses as
they examined the skies for flying objects like the ones discussed in the press
from this time onward, the observers having a tendency to consider any cloud,
bird, or reflection to be a UFO. This has generally. been the normal official
reaction to UFO reports and this is a contributing factor to the estimate that
thousands of UFO sightings go unreported annually and will continue to do so
unless some concrete evidence is found and made public, either of a real UFO or
a living or dead example of extraterrestrial life.

It is interesting to consider that, at the very beginning of the 1947 UFO flap, and
attested to by witnesses, press releases, interviews, radio reports, and uninhibited
by censorship that came too late, the Army Air Force came into possession of a
bona-fide UFO together with the remains of its crew. And apparently since that
time the Air Force and the United States Government have been trying to decide
what to do with it.
3 The AAF Confronts a Crashed UFO and Dead
Extraterrestrials
At about ten minutes to ten on the evening of July 2, 1947, local hardware dealer
Dan Wilmot and his wife were sitting on the front porch of their South Penn
Street home in Roswell, New Mexico, enjoying a cool respite from what had
been one of those hot New Mexico summer days. In Wilmot's words, "All of a
sudden a big glowing object zoomed out of the sky from the southeast. It was
going northwest [toward Corona, New Mexico] at a high rate of speed."

Somewhat startled, Wilmot and his wife ran out into their yard to watch as an
oval object shaped "like two inverted saucers faced mouth to mouth," and
glowing as if lit from the inside, passed over their house and out of sight to the
northwest in forty to fifty seconds. Although Wilmot described the mysterious
object as having been completely silent, Mrs. Wilmot later said she thought she
had heard a slight swishing sound for a brief moment as the object passed
overhead.

Concerned that he might be leaving himself open to ridicule, Wilmot, described

by the Roswell Daily Record as "one of the most respected and reliable citizens
in town," kept silent about his experience for nearly a week in hopes that
"someone else would come out and tell about having seen one."

But nobody told Wilmot anything that might corroborate his experience until, on
July 8, an unusual release to the press came from the public information officer
at the Roswell base. In view of the ensuing excitement, it may have occurred
later to Wilmot that he had seen a preview of an incident which later developed
into a well-kept and continuing secret, at least as far as the public was
concerned. It was not treated as such when it first happened.

On July 8, one day after Mrs. Sleppy's unusual incident with the TWX teletype
machine, Lieutenant Walter Haut, public information officer at the Roswell
Army Air Base, acting on information beginning to filter in to the Roswell Air
Base, jumped the gun in a burst of excitement and enthusiastically issued the
following release to members of the press without first bothering to obtain the
authorization of his base commander, Colonel William Blanchard-an oversight
he was to be made painfully aware of later:
Roswell Army Air Base, Roswell, N.M. 8th July, 1947.A.M.
The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the
intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell
Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the
cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves
County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not
having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able
to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the
509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home.
It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by
Major Marcel to higher headquarters.

This release, which was enthusiastically picked up by the Associated Press and
the New York Times wire service and others, managed to appear in numerous
newspapers across the United States, as well as in a number of foreign journals,
including the prestigious London Times.

The day before the release from the army base, an AP release went out over the
wire service datelined San Francisco, July 7, under the headline: FLYING
SAUCERS SEEN IN MOST STATES NOW. Dealing with a phenomenal
increase in UFO sightings in the United States during the previous two weeks, it
almost served as an introduction to the incident which would attain worldwide
prominence the next day.

The Roswell Daily Record rushed into print on July 8 with the following report,
captioned RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER IN ROSWELL REGION.
NO DETAILS OF FLYING DISCS ARE REVEALED. The following article
implied both a solution of the Flying

Saucer Controversy and a suggestion that the AAF was already involved in the
beginnings of cover-ups. Pertinent points of the article follow:

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 Major J.

According to information released by the department, over authority of Major J.
A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disc was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell
vicinity after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff George Wilcox, here,
that he had found the instrument on his premises.

Major Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered
the disc, it was stated.

After the intelligence office here had inspected the instrument it was flown (by
aircraft) to "higher headquarters." The intelligence office stated that no details of
the saucer's construction or its appearance had been revealed.

Another article in the same July 8 issue of the Roswell Daily Record reported
that the operator and pilots of a private airfield at Carrizozo (about thirty-five
miles southwest of the Brazel crash site) claimed to have seen a similar object in
flight. According to the article:

Mark Sloan, operator of the Carrizozo flying field, reported a flying saucer sped
over the field at about a 4,000-to 6,000-foot altitude.

Sloan said the phenomenon was observed by himself, Grady Warren, flying
instructor, and Nolan Lovelace, Ray Shafer, and another man, all pilots. He
made this description:

"When we first noticed it about 10:00 A.M. we thought it resembled a feather

because it was oscillating. Then we noticed its great speed and decided it was a
flying saucer. Our guesses are that it was moving at between 200 and 600 miles
per hour.

"It passed over the field and almost directly up from southwest to northwest and
was in sight in all only about ten seconds."

It could, of course, be suspected that Sloan had "latched on" to the incident to
give some publicity to his flying field. But later it was to appear that numerous
other witnesses had heard or seen something very unusual in the sky over
Roswell around the time of the landing of a still-unidentified flying object.

Perhaps the weather had something to do with the sightings and the alleged
crash. Some seventy-five miles to the northwest, one of the worst lightning
storms to strike the area in a long time was beginning to rage over the bleak New
Mexico landscape. Lightning storms had occasionally brought down aircraft in
Mexico landscape. Lightning storms had occasionally brought down aircraft in
the past.

The sketchy information used by Lieutenant Haut to write his initial news
release was hardly sufficient to supply the press with certain additional details of
possibly crucial importance which numerous other witnesses, including ranchers,
soldiers, a civil engineer, a group of student archaeologists, and law enforcement
officers, had observed at two distinctly different sites within the area that were
apparently connected with the same crash. These reputedly included a large
flying saucer and the remains of half a dozen or so humanoid creatures, pale in
skin coloring, about four feet tall, and dressed in a kind of one-piece jump-suit
uniform. Nor did they mention a great quantity of highly unusual wreckage,
much of it metallic in nature, apparently originating from the same object and
described by Major Marcel as "nothing made on this earth." Neither was any
mention made to the press of later information reported by witnesses concerning
certain columns of hieroglyphic-like writing or recording on a wooden-like
substance (that was not wood) and similar unknown lettering on the control
panels of the disc or saucer.

That Lieutenant Haut had ample opportunity to regret even the small amount of
information he had given out is now evident. Almost immediately a news
blackout descended over Roswell while higher authorities as far away as the
Pentagon decided what the next move would be.

Several hours later, a new bit of information was suddenly released. It now
appeared that the object was merely a crashed weather balloon. Most papers
copied this new information, with the notable exception of the Washington Post,
which referred rather pointedly to a "news blackout."

Meanwhile, Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air

Force District at Fort Worth, was alerted by a phone call from Lieutenant
General Hoyt Vandenberg, Deputy Chief of the Air Force, that pieces of the
object were on the Roswell Air Base (now called the Walker Air Force Base).
General Ramey at once called Colonel Blanchard and made known his extreme
displeasure as well as that of General Vandenberg for Blanchard's having
initiated the press release. He then directed that the Roswell portion of the
wreckage be immediately loaded aboard a B-29. With two generals "breathing
down his neck," Colonel Blanchard lost no time in ordering Major Marcel
personally to fly this material to the general's headquarters at Carswell Air Force
Base, Fort Worth, Texas, for his examination before flying it on to Wright-
Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio, where it would undergo the "further analysis"
Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio, where it would undergo the "further analysis"
prescribed for it by General Vandenberg himself.

Ramey then went on the air on a hook-up hastily patched out of a Fort Worth
radio station to nervously assure the public that the crashed "fl-fly-fling disc"
was really nothing more than the remains of a downed weather balloon, and that
the whole thing was due only to a case of mistaken identity. "There is no such
gadget [as a flying disc] known to the Army," he said somberly, and then hastily
added the qualification, "at least not at this level."

After the broadcast, in response to a question from a group of still skeptical Fort
Worth press reporters about where the remains of the alleged "weather device"
were at that moment, Ramey snapped irritably, "It's in my office, and it will
probably stay right there!" He then repeated for the reporters what he had just
said on the air: "The special flight to Wright Field has been canceled, gentlemen.
This whole affair has been most unfortunate, but in light of the excitement that
has been stirred up lately about these so-called flying discs, it is not surprising.
Now let's all go home and call it an evening."

While some members of the press may have suspected that Ramey was shading
the truth, they had no proof. However, an interesting comment on this incident
was supplied during a September 9, 1979, interview with General Ramey's
former adjutant, Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose, now a retired brigadier
general. Speaking from a comfortable margin of thirty-two years after the event,
he observed that there had been received "orders from on high to ship the
material from Roswell directly to Wright Field by special plane." He added that
the general (Ramey) was in complete charge and the rest of the officers and men
involved "just followed orders." The general was most concerned that the large
number of press reporters present be "taken off his back in a hurry." The weather
balloon story was a fabrication designed to accomplish that task and "put out the
fire" at the same time. He did not recall who first suggested the weather-balloon
explanation, but thinks it may have been Ramey himself.

Colonel (now General) DuBose is the man pictured with Ramey on page 33
posing for reporters on the floor of Ramey's office with the hastily substituted
wreckage of a real Rawin weather balloon. Only nine months later, in May of
1948, DuBose was to become chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force at Fort
Worth.

A striking example of how command can orchestrate new policy with original
A striking example of how command can orchestrate new policy with original
reports, even if it entails a certain modification of what has been reported, is
afforded by the case of Warrant Officer Irving Newton. At the time of the
Roswell Incident, Newton was in charge of the Base Weather Office and Flight
Services at the Carswell-Fort Worth Air Base in Texas.

As Newton recollects, he had neither seen nor heard anything about the Roswell
Incident on July 7. But on the night of July 8, as he was working in the Weather
Office, the phone rang. It was General Ramey. The general ordered Newton to
report to his office immediately. Newton, in spite of a certain urgency in the
general's tone, nevertheless found the courage to inform the general that he was
the only man on duty in the Weather Office and as such he was also in charge of
flight-control operations that evening. To Newton's mildly couched protest the
general replied with a decisive command flair: "Get your ass over here in ten
minutes. If you can't get a car commandeer the first one that comes along-on my
orders."

When Newton got to his destination he was briefed by a colonel to the effect that
an object had been found by a major in Roswell and that the general had decided
that it was really a weather balloon and wanted him (Newton) to identify it as
such. After this hurried briefing Newton was ushered into a room filled with
reporters and photographers where he was handed several pieces of what he
immediately recognized as material belonging to a Rawin-type balloon, although
somewhat "deteriorated." A number of other pieces were laid out on brown
paper on the floor. While the examination was taking place a series of
photographs were taken of the general and his aide.

Newton said (Moore interview, July 1979): "It was cut and dried. I had sent up
thousands of them and there's no doubt that what I was given were parts of a
balloon. I was later told that the major from Roswell had identified the stuff as a
flying saucer but that the general had been suspicious of this identification from
the beginning and that's why I had been called.

Question: But wouldn't the people at Roswell have been able to identify a
balloon on their own?

- They certainly should have. It was a regular Rawin sonde. They must have seen
hundreds of them.

- What happened after your identification of the object?

- When I had identified it as a balloon I was dismissed.

- Can you describe the fabric? Was it easy to tear?

- Certainly. You would have to'be careful not to tear it. The metal involved was
likely an extremely thin Alcoa wrap. It was very flimsy.

In this connection we note that Major Marcel as well as others were insistent
about the great strength of the bits of metallic material they found, how it could
not be torn or even dented by sledgehammer blows. It seems fairly evident that
the wreckage did not, in spite of official second thoughts, come from a Rawin
balloon.

Another telling error on the part of Ramey's office can be found in the initial
news releases identifying the Roswell wreckage as having come from a balloon.
It is important to note here that in 1947 there were two distinct types of Rawin
devices in use-the Rawin target (ML-306) and the Rawin sonde (AN/AMT-4).
As Newton, and certainly any other competent weather officer of the time,
would have known, only one of these, the Rawin target, incorporated metallic
foil as part of its design. The Rawin sonde consisted only of a 100-200 gram
neoprene balloon attached to a small radio transmitter. Yet the news release from
Ramey's office, which was clearly written before Newton's examination of the
device (note that the photo of Ramey on page 33 shows him holding a copy of
that very document), appears ignorant of this all-important fact and identifies the
wreckage as "debris from a Rawin sonde." The error was later corrected in
subsequent releases but appears to have escaped the attention of the press.

The balloon story may even have been inspired by an event that had occurred
only three days earlier on a farm in Circleville, Pickway County, Ohio. On July
5, 1947, the tinfoil and paper wreckage of a real Rawin target device was
discovered on the ground by Sherman Campbell, a local farmer. It was
immediately identified as such by the military without the necessity of first
sending it on to "higher headquarters" for examination. A second such device,
discovered on July 8 by David C. Heffner, was also quickly identified. In neither
case was there anything strange or inexplicable about the wreckage.

Considerable information about the construction and purpose of weather and

other scientific-purpose balloons used in the late 1940s was obtained in a series
of interviews with С. В. Moore, aerologist and physicist currently with the New
Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology at Socorro. In the summer of 1947,
Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology at Socorro. In the summer of 1947,
Moore (no relation to the author) was directly involved in a New York
University-sponsored high-altitude-research balloon project based out of the
North Field of White Sands, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a project which, he
said, he believed was responsible for "at least some of the flying-saucer reports
in the area." Later that winter he took part in the launching of the Navy's first
Skyhook upper-atmospheric research balloon from Camp Ripley, near
Minneapolis, Minnesota, under the auspices of General Mills. He said:

“The Skyhooks resulted from the Navy's 1946 Project Helios, designed
originally to launch human scientists to high altitudes to make scientific
measurements. Later it was decided to use instruments instead, and Project
Skyhook developed. The project was initially classified "Confidential" just so
public information on them could be controlled. The first balloon was
constructed of vinyl chloride and was inflated at New Brighton, Minnesota,
during the summer of 1947, but there were no actual launchings until about six
months later. The vinyl chloride composition was changed to polyethylene early
on-perhaps in January of 1948, and was used up to the end of the project. These
balloons could lift a seventy-pound payload... Only a very few of these were
ever launched in New Mexico, and none certainly in 1947”.

When asked whether the Roswell device might have been a weather or other
scientific balloon, Moore replied: "Based on the description you just gave me, I
can definitely rule this out. There wasn't a balloon in use back in '47, or even
today for that matter, that could have produced debris over such a large area or
torn up the ground in any way. I have no idea what such an object might have
been, but I can't believe a balloon would fit such a description."

С. В. Moore's description of a Rawin target device, of which he had seen and

handled many, was also important in that it strongly reinforced the belief that
anyone finding such "flimsy foil and balsa-wood material" would have had great
difficulty in confusing it with anything out of the ordinary.

One is compelled to admire the tactics of the headquarters in question as a way

of defusing public interest in-or even panic caused by-the incident. If, for
example, a blanket denial had been made, it would probably have served only to
increase curiosity, but a human admission of a case of mistaken identity, even on
the part of the Air Force, induced a certain sympathetic understanding and, more
important, deflated the mystery of the incident as surely as letting out the helium
would deflate a real weather balloon.
Now, on July 9, a rash of denials appeared in the press.

The Dallas Morning News: SUSPECTED "DISC" ONLY FLYING WEATHER

VANE

The Daily Times Herald (Dallas): SERVICES TRY TO STOP "DISC" TALK.
The article included the observation, "Persons who thought they had their hands
on the $3,000 offered for a genuine flying saucer found their hands full of
nothing."

The Roswell Daily Record ran an eight-column headline: GENERAL RAMEY

EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER, with a subtitle introducing the theme of the
lead article: General Ramey says disc is weather balloon.

In the same issue, there is a story about a rancher, William Brazel, who had
alerted the sheriff's office at Roswell about unusual debris that had fallen out of
the sky after an aerial explosion. The story was headlined: HARASSED
RANCHER WHO LOCATED "SAUCER" SORRY HE TOLD ABOUT IT.
Brazel, who throughout this interview had obviously gone to great pains to tell
the newspaper people exactly what the Air Force had instructed him to say
regarding how he had come to discover the wreckage and what it looked like,
showed a bit of independent spirit at the end of the session by risking the opinion
that, regardless of what he had just said, it was still no weather balloon. He was
familiar with weather balloons from past experiences, he observed, and "I am
sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.... But if I find
anything else besides a bomb, they are going to have a hard time getting me to
say anything about it."

Although the Roswell paper faithfully printed General Ramey's balloon story on
the first page (as we have already noted), it was clear on the editorial page that
they weren't exactly buying it either. Seeming to sense that what Brazel had said
in his interview had apparently been carefully rigged by the Air Force, and
surmising, nevertheless, that AAF officers would know a weather balloon when
they saw one, the Record cautiously editorialized:

AND NOW WHAT IS IT?

With the telephone ringing, excited voices shouting into newsroom personnel
ears pouring out eager questions which were unanswerable, it was discovered
shortly after publication time of the Record yesterday afternoon that curiosity
over reports from 44 states of the Union that silver discs had been seen had
over reports from 44 states of the Union that silver discs had been seen had
crystallized into belief.

The Record had no more than "hit the street" until the telephone barrage began,
with questioners checking up on what they had just read, doubtful of their own
eyes.

But the story stood, just as all amazing things stand in these days of wonderful
feats and curious performances.

What the disc is is another matter. The Army isn't telling its secrets yet, from all
appearances when this was written. Maybe it's a fluke, and maybe it isn't.
Anyone's guess is pretty good at the moment.

Maybe the thing is still a hoax, as has been the belief of most folks from the
start. But, SOMETHING has been found.

Dealing with the radio broadcast made by General Ramey to further deflate the
excitement caused by the first announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle added
in an archly contrived comment that "The mysterious flying discs have been seen
all over the nation (except Kansas which is dry) and have been described as
traveling... 1,200 miles an hour."

This last example, a technique of treating UFO reports as being made by persons
who were either drunk or eccentric visionaries has, of course, been frequently
employed by the media from 1947 on.

Meanwhile, as press reporters continued to try to contact Colonel Blanchard, the

colonel suddenly and conveniently went on leave on July 8, 1947, at the very
same time that Major Marcel was flying with the crashed debris to Carswell.
Command of the base was temporarily assumed by the base deputy commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Payne Jennings. When reporters persisted in their attempts to
reach Colonel Blanchard, they were informed that "He is on leave and therefore
unavailable for comment."

Although there is no doubt that Colonel Blanchard would certainly have

followed without question Ramey's orders about how to deal with the alleged
flying disc, he would also have possessed sufficient qualifications to have known
whether he was dealing with the remains of a weather balloon. Blanchard, who
was later destined to attain the rank of three-star general, was, in 1947, already a
highly decorated war hero with a distinguished war record as commander of
highly decorated war hero with a distinguished war record as commander of
bomb groups in the Pacific and later as operations officer of the Twentieth Air
Force. Although few knew it at the time, Blanchard had come within a hair's
breadth of being chosen as one of the pilots designated to drop America's first
atom bombs on Japan in 1945. He was beaten out in the competition only by the
two who actually dropped the bombs.

Although General Blanchard is now dead, his widow recently confirmed

(interview with Stanton Friedman) that her husband knew that the wreckage that
he had sent to Carswell did not belong to any balloon. "He knew it was nothing
made by us," she said, noting that "At first he thought it might be Russian
because of the strange symbols on it. Later on, he realized it wasn't Russian
either."

At the same time, Ramey's A-2 Division (Intelligence) chief, Colonel Alfred E.
Kalberer, began making public appearances at meetings of several civic
organizations around the Fort Worth area with a presentation designed to
"counteract the growing hysteria towards flying discs."

On July 10, according to the records of the Fort Worth Army Air Base (which
were originally classified as "Secret"), "Colonel Irvine, Assistant to the Chief of
Staff, H.Q,., Strategic Air Command (SAC)" visited General Ramey on an
undisclosed mission, which almost certainly included a discussion about the
crashed disc.

Lieutenant Louis Bohanon, commanding Roswell's third photo laboratory unit,

whose duties included the photographing of air crashes or damage to planes, left
the base less than two weeks after the incident. It would appear that his group
would have been called upon to make photographs of any unusual or
unidentified crash in the area. But there is no record of any such photos.
Lieutenant Bohanon was relieved of command by base special order No. 139 on
July 18 and transferred to Hamilton Field, California.

Lieutenant Colonel Jennings, who temporarily assumed command of the base

after Colonel Blanchard's departure, was to suffer a far stranger fate. Not too
long after the Roswell Incident, while en route to England on a special
assignment, his plane disappeared while flying over the Bermuda Triangle
without sending a last message. No trace of the plane or of any survivors was
ever found. Major Marcel had been scheduled to go on the same flight, but
fortunately was pulled off upon the personal intervention of Colonel Blanchard.
The initial reports about the landing of a "flying disc" had already been widely
spread by radio stations other than KSWS in Roswell, doubtlessly based on the
first press release and in spite of the subsequent news blackout. Flight Major
Hughie Green, of the British RAF, then en route by car from California to
Philadelphia, was driving through New Mexico during July 1947. He remembers
clearly what he heard on his car radio:

“As I drove through New Mexico from west to east, I kept hearing these reports
about a downed saucer on local stations as I came within the radius of each one.
I was especially interested in the reports because of being in the RAF myself and
remembering the wartime flap about "foo fighters"-the flying saucers of those
days. The radio stations I was listening to were so on edge that they kept
interrupting their regular broadcasts to give the latest developments. I am certain
that one of the news broadcasts commented on the fact that the sheriff and his
men were proceeding towards the field of the crash within sight of the wreckage.

I heard more reports as I entered the next state and there was further material, as
I remember, in the press. But when I got to Philadelphia there was nothing at all
about it in the papers or on the radio. I began asking reporter friends about it but
they replied that they knew about it but heard that it had been hushed up”.

As it was impossible to cover up the incident completely, a lively legend, if

legend it is, has persisted to this day and it was to be expected that a book would
be published about it as close as possible to the time of the incident. Such a
book-Behind the Flying Saucers (Holt, 1950)-was written by Frank Scully, an
author and syndicated columnist who based his information on the original
report of a saucer crash in New Mexico and the alleged recovery of the ship and
the dead bodies of its alien crew by the U.S. military. It appears, perhaps because
of his haste to finish the book while the subject was "hot," that Scully plunged
into print without sufficient checking. As could be expected, his book, although
financially eminently successful, was highly inaccurate and was soon "shot
down" factually by the Air Force because of discrepancies in his research and
incorrect information, including lack of names, mistakes concerning the area in
which the incident occurred, and general unavailability of informants-something
easier to overcome at the present time since the passing of the Freedom of
Information Act along with a more liberal declassification policy. In his apparent
haste to get into print, Scully placed the area of the crash near Aztec, in the
upper western corner of the state, hundreds of miles from Roswell, and this
mistake is still evident in UFO and other books published throughout the world.
mistake is still evident in UFO and other books published throughout the world.

Even so, Mrs. Frank Scully, widow of the writer, interviewed by Bill Moore at
her home in June and December 1979, steadfastly maintained that the basic story
behind her husband's book was correct and that he had been vilified because of
it-particularly by J. P. Cahn, a "most unscrupulous journalist from San
Francisco" who may have been paid off to do "the hatchet job" on Scully. It is
true that Cahn's article on Scully and his book is full of exaggerations and
inaccuracies. Unfortunately other journalists followed Cahn's account without
bothering to check his accuracy. In any event, it was indeed Cahn's article that
proved most damaging.

Cahn's condemnation of Scully's story, which first made print nearly two years
after the appearance of the book itself, leans heavily upon the fact that at least
two of Scully's informants were unscrupulous confidence men who were up to
their ears in land fraud. This, added to the problems created by Roland Gelatt's
blatant misquotation of several passages from Scully's book in a review by
Gelatt which appeared in Saturday Review at the time the book was published,
and a general condemnation of Scully's research methods by almost every one of
the book's reviewers, seems to have been enough to convince other writers and
journalists that the whole thing was a monstrous hoax and that Scully was its
unfortunate victim. It is interesting to note, however, that virtually all of the
book's detractors seem to have been content to rely on Gelatt's misquotations and
Cahn's somewhat questionable assumption that land fraud was automatically
proof of saucer fraud.

Although they readily condemned Scully for poor and sloppy research, none of
them except Cahn seemed the least bit willing to do any of their own on the case;
and Cahn's research was entirely limited to investigating the backgrounds of two
of Scully's informants. In any event the damage was done and Scully's reputation
suffered because of it.

There are indications however that Scully's book was taken somewhat more
seriously in other circles-especially military. According to Mrs. Scully, a curious
comment was made to her and her husband in late 1953 by Captain Edward
Ruppelt, who at the time had just retired as head of Project Blue Book, the Air
Force's third public attempt to deal with the flood of saucer sightings that
continued to sweep the country after the initial flurry in 1947. "Confidentially,"
said Ruppelt, "of all the books that have been published about flying saucers,
your book was the one that gave us the most headaches because it was the
closest to the truth." (Italics added)

Mrs. Scully said that her husband had received virtually all of his information
from an unnamed government scientist whom Scully had befriended. She said
that she had not heard from this individual for many years and did not even
know whether he is still living, but she refused, even under promises of strict
confidentiality, to reveal the name of this scientist. She did say, however, that
this person had revealed to her and her husband about thirty years ago that one
or more of the alien bodies from the crash had been transported to the
Rosenwald Institute in Chicago for study.

In short, Scully's book may be said to have provided the Air Force with an
excellent opportunity to establish the entire legend as spurious or, at best, an
erratic flight of imagination. It might also have served to stop other books at the
source since .Behind the Flying Saucers seemed to lack a firm foundation in
investigation or fact. It might occur to an observer, nevertheless, that authorities
concerned with the cover-up might even have encouraged the publication of
Behind the Flying Saucers as a subterfuge aiding to discredit the initial reports.
This is called "gray" propaganda in psychological warfare operations: although it
appears to favor one's opponents its final effect is to discredit or confuse them.

At about this same time Fletcher Pratt, author and leading military historian,
initiated additional rumor waves in the press by announcing, in the early part of
1950, that he had obtained "through confidential channels" information that a
flying saucer had crashed to earth and that bodies of a vaguely human
appearance and about thirty-five inches tall had been found dead in the
wreckage.

This further reference to a Roswell-type incident was, of course, denied in

official circles with the customary vehemence. However, it must not be forgotten
that Fletcher Pratt was a reputable military historian with a historian's regard for
the highest possible accuracy of information and therefore would have been
reticent to accept a report dealing with startling information from an unreliable
source. Pratt was also (to the author's knowledge) familiar with the requirements
of military security and, even if at first convinced of the accuracy of his source,
could have been later persuaded to let the matter drop in the interests of security.

In any event, the commotion engendered by the alleged capture of a UFO

appears to have resulted in a continued close Army Air Force surveillance of
UFOs with reports running into the thousands, all of which finally culminated in
UFOs with reports running into the thousands, all of which finally culminated in
the so-called Condon Report of 1969 (an Air Force project contracted to the
University of Colorado), which finally determined, according to their press
release, that only 10 percent of the UFO sightings investigated by them seemed
to resist all logical explanation. (A more rigorous examination of the report
itself, however, would seem to suggest that the actual number of sightings
lacking reasonable explanation was somewhat closer to 30 percent.) In any case,
it was determined (using the Condon Report as an excuse) that the effort and
expense of Air Force investigation did not seem to justify the continued
existence of an Air Force project (in this case, Project Blue Book) designed to
publicly investigate UFOs. Partly as a result of Condon's recommendations
(which in fact appear to have been somewhat rigged beforehand by the Air
Force) Blue Book was canceled on December 17, 1969, and the Air Force, after
some twenty-two years, ceased to have any visible interest in the UFO
phenomenon.

One particularly interesting aspect of the Air Force's investigation of UFOs

during the Blue Book years was Air Force regulation 200-2, instituted in August
1953 and containing detailed information to Air Force personnel on how to cope
with UFOs, including pages of checklists and diagrams enabling the witness to
furnish a description. Among these instructions concerning sightings of UFOs
(which officially don't exist, but here's what to do when you encounter one)
some especially pertinent directives, addressed to base commanders, are
included concerning the release of UFO information to the general public. AFR
200-2, paragraph nine:

“In response to local inquiries, it is permissible to inform news media

representatives on UFOBs [i.e., UFOs] when the object is positively identified as
a familiar object.... For those objects which are not explainable, only the fact that
ATIC [Air Technical Intelligence Command] will analyze the data is worthy of
release, due to the many unknowns involved...»

One might reflect that if Major Marcel, Lieutenant Haut, and Roswell Base
Commander Colonel Blanchard had had the advantage of having AFR 200-2 to
consult and guide them, no public uproar regarding the Roswell Incident - the
echoes of which can still be discerned - would have taken place.

Since 1947, UFOs have been seen by the thousands every year throughout the
world and have been blamed for or suspected of causing the disappearance of
ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle, of the capture and brainwashing of
human beings, interference with communications and electric systems, and of
human beings, interference with communications and electric systems, and of
being participants in ray-gun versus machine-gun and rocket fights in a number
of countries. (The earthlings lost.) It is therefore especially notable to remember
that one of the first modern reports, the reputed UFO crash in New Mexico, was
the most unusual visitation of all and took place within one hundred miles of an
air force base.

In any case, since the UFO security procedures had not been sufficiently
established in 1947, the incident was widely disseminated before it was
smothered. Like many other legends, it seems to possess an extraordinary power
of survival and has been repeatedly revived, sometimes, as we shall see, by
direct presidential request. Furthermore, witnesses of the incident and secondary
witnesses-those who first spoke to the direct witnesses-are still alive and
remember details with commendable recall. A cross-check of their recollections
indicates a general agreement with the different aspects contained in the first
reports of the fallen disc, or whatever it really was.
4 Witnesses Speak - the Town Remembers
Barney Barnett, a resident of Socorro, New Mexico, a civil engineer working for
the federal government in soil conservation, was one of the first witnesses to
arrive at the site of the fallen saucer, sometime in the morning of July 3, 1947.

While living in New Mexico, Barney and his wife, Ruth, had become close
friends with L. W. "Vern" Maltais and his wife, Jean Swedmark Maltais. Vern
was "on assignment with the military" in New Mexico at this time.

In February 1950, during a visit by the Maltaises to Socorro, Barnett told his
friends an extraordinary story. Before telling them, however, he cautioned them
not to repeat it. Barnett claimed to have personally witnessed a flying-saucer
crash in the Socorro area-that he had seen it and seen dead bodies that were not
human beings. Then the area was quickly sealed off and the bodies and
wreckage removed by the military.

Although three decades have passed since Barnett told his strange tale to the
Maltaises, they remember it very well, especially as it was underscored by the
many UFO sightings reported in New Mexico at the time. Both the Maltaises
spoke highly of Barnett's character. He was older than they were, very
conservative, and quite sure of himself-definitely not the type to go about
spreading wild rumors. But, the Maltaises recalled, Barnett definitely said he had
seen the thing on the ground. According to the Maltaises, this is what Barnett
told them:

“I was out on assignment, working near Magdalena, New Mexico, one morning
when light reflecting off some sort of large metallic object caught my eye.
Thinking that a plane may have crashed during the night, I went over to where it
was-about a mile, perhaps a mile and a quarter away on flat desert land. By the
time I got there, I realized it wasn't a plane at all, but some sort of metallic, disc-
shaped object about twenty-five or thirty feet across. While I was looking at it
and trying to decide what it was, some other people came up from the other
direction and began looking around it too. They told me later that they were a
part of an archaeological research team from some eastern university [the
University of Pennsylvania] and that they too had first thought a plane had
crashed. They were all over the place looking at the wreck.

I noticed that they were standing around looking at some dead bodies that haa
I noticed that they were standing around looking at some dead bodies that haa
fallen to the ground. I think there were others [dead bodies] in the machine,
which was a kind of metallic instrument of some sort-a kind of disc. It was not
all that big. It seemed to be made of a metal that looked like dirty stainless steel.
The machine had been split open by explosion or impact.

I tried to get close to see what the bodies were like. They were all dead as far as I
could see and there were bodies inside and outside the vehicle. The ones outside
had been tossed out by the impact. They were like humans but they were not
humans. The heads were round, the eyes were small, and they had no hair. The
eyes were oddly spaced. They were quite small by our standards and their heads
were larger in proportion to their bodies than ours. Their clothing seemed to be
one-piece and gray in color. You couldn't see any zippers, belts, or buttons. They
seemed to me to be all males and there were a number of them. I was close
enough to touch them but I didn't-I was escorted away before I could look at
them anymore.

While we were looking at them a military officer drove up in a truck with a

driver and took control. He told everybody that the Army was taking over and to
get out of the way. Other military personnel came up and cordoned off the area.
We were told to leave the area and not to talk to anyone whatever about what we
had seen... that it was our patriotic duty to remain silent...»

Mrs. Maltais interrupted at this point to add: “Barnett said that he was out in the
field when he saw this thing, and that there were other individuals there with
him. I think he said that the individuals he talked to there were from the
University of Pennsylvania. They were doing some digs in the New Mexico area
and were involved with this thing only because they were in the area when it
crashed.

The object was a metallic-like instrument of some sort. The individuals were
quite small by our standards. Their heads were larger in proportion to their
bodies compared to our human standards. I remember vividly that Barnett had
been told to say absolutely nothing and he had not done so for several years until
he shared his experience with us in 1950. We were very close friends, perhaps
the closest he had.

Barnett called the creatures "males." There was no mention of females. There
were a number of them, but I can't remember how many he said there were. He
repeated several times that their eyes were small and oddly spaced.
The object was soon moved away from the crash site. They brought in a large
truck. Whoever was involved with it asked the spectators to leave. This included
the University of Pennsylvania people. Everyone was told to leave the area and
not to talk about it to anyone, because to do so would be unpatriotic”.

When asked if she recalled in what part of New Mexico Barnett had said the
crash had occurred, Mrs. Maltais answered: "No, I don't exactly recall. It was
somewhere out of Socorro. He may have said exactly, but I don't recall. I
remember he said it was prairie - 'the Flats' is the way he put it. Definitely not in
a mountainous area. Barnett traveled all over New Mexico, but did most of his
work in the area directly west of Socorro."

As Barney Barnett's reported version of the incident is so complete and ties in so

neatly with other reports it is pertinent to consider his reputation in the area and
whether or not he was especially imaginative or visionary.

Grady Landon (Barney) Barnett worked as an engineer in the area for the U.S.
Soil Conservation Service for twenty years until his retirement in 1957. He was a
veteran of World War I (Second Lieutenant, 313 Engineers, AEF) and past
commander of the American Legion Post at Mosquero, New Mexico-certainly a
model of a conservative respected citizen.

Holm Bursum, Jr., bank executive, former mayor of Socorro, and son of Holm
Bursum, Sr., former U.S. senator from New Mexico, was not unaware of the
atomic or space age, as his cattle were exposed to fallout from the first 1945 A-
bomb test at Alamogordo, which caused them to turn spotted white and
subsequently to be shipped to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for study. When
interviewed by Moore in 1979, he immediately recalled having known Barnett
quite well, and spoke highly of him. Asked about the possibility that Barnett's
crashed UFO account may have been true, Bursum replied:

"A tale like that would have been fantastic all right but I would have to say that
anything he said would have to be true to the best of his knowledge."

Lee Garner, former cowboy and later sheriff of Socorro County, remembers
Barney Barnett favorably and especially remembers the archaeological
expedition, doubtlessly because of his own interest in Indian archaeology. He
thought the expedition was from Michigan, but said there may have been
Pennsylvania students involved with it. John Greenwald, a former federal
government employee and now a retired farmer in Socorro County, recalled that
government employee and now a retired farmer in Socorro County, recalled that
Barnett worked primarily in a map area to the west of Socorro called the Plains
of San Agustin, also called locally "the Flats," and believed that the incident had
taken place there.

J. F. "Fleck" Danley of Magdalena, New Mexico, was more specific: - Barnett

was an engineer and worked under me out of Magdalena in the 1940s and early
fifties. He was a good man... one of the most honest men I ever knew.

Question (by Moore): - Did Barnett ever say anything about a flying saucer? -
Yes, there was one time. Barney came into the office one afternoon all kind of
excited and said to me: "You know those flying-saucer things they've been
talking about, Flek...? Well, they're real." Then he said something about he's just
had a look at one of them. I was real busy at the time and wasn't in any mood to
buy a story like that, so I just turned around to him and said: "Bull ----!" and
went back to work. All he told me was that he saw it. I wasn't prepared to
believe it at the time and after I had said

"Bull ----" he didn't explain anything else about it. I got to thinking about it later
that maybe I shouldn't have been so rough with him because he wasn't the sort to
go around making up stories like that, but when I asked him about it a day or so
later all he said was out on the flats, that it looked like a saucer, and that he didn't
care to talk any more about it.

Fleck felt he could remember the date of the incident if given time to think about
it. In a subsequent interview conducted in his living room some four months
later, he chuckled and said:

"Yes, I recall it now. It had to have been sometime in the early summer of 1947.
I didn't believe any of it when Barney first told me, but we did talk about it some
later on, even though I know I told you before that we hadn't. I'd have to say
from what he told me that I believe it now. I never knew Barney to lie... not
about anything." When asked if he could repeat what Barney had told him,
Danley replied: "I'll have to think on that awhile. Maybe I've told you enough
already."

Perhaps some of the most important testimony in the matter of the crashed disc
comes from Major (now Lieutenant Colonel) Jesse A. Marcel, ranking staff
officer in charge of intelligence at the Roswell Army Air Base at the time of the
incident. Marcel, now retired and living in Houma, Louisiana, had been flying
since 1928 and, in his own words, was "familiar with virtually everything that
since 1928 and, in his own words, was "familiar with virtually everything that
flew." As one of the few cartographers familiar with both the making and
interpreting of aerial maps before World War II, he was sent to intelligence
school by the Army Air Force following Pearl Harbor and proved to be so
capable a student that, upon completion of training, he was retained as an
instructor. Fifteen months later, he applied for and was granted combat duty, and
went to New Guinea, where he became intelligence officer for his bomber
squadron and later for his entire group. Flying as bombardier, waist gunner, and
pilot, he logged 468 hours of combat flying in B-24s, was awarded five air
medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft, and was himself shot down once
(on his third mission).

Toward the end of the war, Marcel was chosen to become a part of the 509th
Bomb Wing of the U.S. Army Air Force, the world's only atomic bomb group at
the time, and one of the few "elite" groups in the U.S. military, where all officers
and enlisted men were literally hand-picked for their jobs and required high-
security clearances. As a part of this group in 1946, he was instrumental in
handling security for the 1946 Kwajalein atom-bomb tests (Operation
Crossroads) and was awarded a commendation by the U.S. Navy for his work.

In recent interviews (Moore and Stanton Friedman, February, May, and

December 1979) he remembered some interesting details concerning his own
connection with the Roswell Incident and the intriguing possibility that either
there was a second disc that exploded in the air or that material fell, after an
explosion, from the disc described in Barnett's account before that object
apparently crashed to the earth some distance to the west.

Question: - Major Marcel, did you personally see a crashed UFO?

- I saw a lot of wreckage but no complete machine. Whatever it was had to have
exploded in the air above ground level. It had disintegrated before it hit the
ground. The wreckage was scattered over an area of about three quarters of a
mile long and several hundred feet wide.

- How did the Roswell Base know about the crash at Brazel's ranch?

- We heard about it on July 7 when we got a call from the county sheriff's office
at Roswell. I was eating lunch at the officers' club when the call came through
saying that I should go out and talk to Brazel. The sheriff said that Brazel had
told him that something had exploded over Brazel's ranch and that there was a
lot of debris scattered around.
lot of debris scattered around.

I finished my lunch and went into town to talk to this fellow. When I had heard
what he had to say, I decided that this was a matter that had better be brought to
the attention of the colonel [Colonel Blanchard] right away and let him decide
what ought to be done. I wanted Brazel to accompany me back to the base with
his truck, but he said he had some things to do first and could he meet me
somewhere in an hour or so. I arranged for him to meet me at the sheriff's office,
and went back to see the colonel.

In my discussion with the colonel, we determined that a downed aircraft of some

unusual sort might be involved, so the colonel said I had better get out there, and
to take whatever I needed and go. I and a CIC [Counter-Intelligence Corps]
agent from West Texas by the name of Cavitt [Marcel couldn't recall his first
name] followed this man out to his ranch, with me driving my staff car [a '42
Buick] and Cavitt in a Jeep Carryall. There were almost no roads, and at spots
we literally had to go right across country. It was as close to the middle of
nowhere as you could get. Anyhow, we got there very late in the afternoon and
had to spend the night with this fellow. All we had to eat was some cold pork
and beans and some crackers.

Brazel lived on the southeast side of Corona-quite far. The closest town was
thirty miles away. He lived in a dinky house on a sheep ranch-no radio, no
telephone-lived there by himself most of the time. His wife and kids lived in
Tularosa or Carrizozo [Note: It was Tularosa.] so the children would have some
place to attend school.

It seems to me that Brazel told me that he thought he had heard an odd explosion
late in th'e evening several days earlier during an electrical storm, but paid no
special attention to it at the time because he had attributed it to just a freak part
of the storm. He didn't find the wreckage until the next morning.

On Saturday, July 5, 1947, Brazel went into town-Corona. While he was there he
heard stories about flying saucers having been seen all over the area. He began
to think that's what had come down on his ranch, but I don't know whether he
said anything about it to anyone at the time.

On Sunday, July 6, Brazel decided he had better go into town and report this to
someone. When he got there, he went to the Chaves County sheriff's office and
told the story to the sheriff. It was the sheriff, George Wilcox, who called me at
the base. I was eating lunch at the time and had just sat down when the phone
the base. I was eating lunch at the time and had just sat down when the phone
rang.

- Do you think that what you saw was a weather balloon?

- It was not. I was pretty well acquainted with most everything that was in the air
at that time, both ours and foreign. I was also acquainted with virtually every
type of weather-observation or radar tracking device being used by either the
civilians or the military. It was definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor
was it any sort of plane or missile. What it was we didn't know. We just picked
up the fragments. It was something I had never seen before, or since, for that
matter. I didn't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't anything built by us and
it most certainly wasn't any weather balloon.

- Can you describe the materials that you found on the site?

- There was all kinds of stuff-small beams about three eighths or a half inch
square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher.
These looked something like balsa wood, and were of about the same weight,
except that they were not wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible,
and would not burn. There was a great deal of an unusual parchment-like
substance which was brown in color and extremely strong, and a great number of
small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn't tinfoil. I was interested
in electronics and kept looking for something that resembled instruments or
electronic equipment, but I didn't find anything. One of the other fellows, Cavitt,
I think, found a black, metallic-looking box several inches square. As there was
no apparent way to open this, and since it didn't appear to be an instrument
package of any sort (it too was very lightweight), we threw it in with the rest of
the stuff. I don't know what eventually happened to the box, but it went along
with the rest of the material we eventually took to Fort Worth.

- What was especially interesting about the material?

- One thing that impressed me about the debris was the fact that a lot of it looked
like parchment. It had little numbers with symbols that we had to call
hieroglyphics because I could not understand them. They could not be read, they
were just like symbols, something that meant something, and they were not all
the same, but the same general pattern, I would say. They were pink and purple.
They looked like they were painted on. These little numbers could not be
broken, could not be burned. I even took my cigarette lighter and tried to burn
broken, could not be burned. I even took my cigarette lighter and tried to burn
the material we found that resembled parchment and balsa, but it would not
burn-wouldn't even smoke. But something that is even more astounding is that
the pieces of metal that we brought back were so thin, just like the tinfoil in a
pack of cigarettes. I didn't pay too much attention to that at first, until one of the
boys came to me and said: "You know that metal that was in there? I tried to
bend-the stuff and it won't bend. I even tried it with a sledgehammer. You can't
make a dent on it." ...This particular piece of metal was about two feet long and
maybe a foot wide. It was so light it weighed practically nothing, that was true of
all the material that was brought up, it weighed practically nothing ... it was so
thin. So I tried to bend the stuff. We did all we could to bend it. It would not
bend and you could not tear it or cut it either. We even tried making a dent in it
with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, and there was still no dent in it... It's still a
mystery to me what the whole thing was. Now by bend, I mean crease. It was
possible to flex this stuff back and forth, even to wrinkle it, but you could not put
a crease in it that would stay, nor could you dent it at all. I would almost have to
describe it as a metal with plastic properties. One of the fellows tried to put some
of the pieces together-like a jigsaw puzzle. He managed to get about ten square
feet together, but it wasn't enough to get any idea of the general shape of the
object itself. Whatever it was, it was big.

- What did you do with the material you had picked up?

- We collected all the debris we could handle. When we had filled the Carryall, I
began to fill the trunk and back seat of the Buick. That afternoon [July 7] we
headed back to Roswell and arrived there in the early evening.

When we arrived there, we discovered that the story that we had found a flying
disc had leaked out ahead of us. We had an eager-beaver PIO [public
information officer] on the base who had taken it upon himself to call the AP on
this thing. We had several calls that night, and one reporter even came to the
house, but of course I couldn't confirm anything to them over the phore, and the
man who came to the house my wife sent over to see the colonel. The next
morning that written press release went out, and after that things really hit the
fan. The phone rang right off the hook. I heard that the brass fried him later on
for putting out that press release, but then I can't say so for sure...

Anyway, that next afternoon we loaded everything into a B-29 on orders from
Colonel Blanchard and flew it all to Fort Worth. I was scheduled to fly it all the
way to Wright Field in Ohio, but when we got to Carswell at Fort Worth, the
way to Wright Field in Ohio, but when we got to Carswell at Fort Worth, the
general nixed it. He took control at this point, told the press it was all a weather
balloon, and ordered me not to talk to the press under any circumstances. I was
pulled off the flight and someone else was assigned to fly the stuff up to Wright
[Patterson] Field. Everything was sent to Wright-Patterson for analysis.

Just after we got to Carswell, Fort Worth, we were told to bring some of this
stuff up to the general's office-that he wanted to take a look at it. We did this and
spread it out on the floor on some brown paper.

What we had was only a very small portion of the debris-there was a whole lot
more. There was half a B-29-ful outside.

General Ramey allowed some members of the press in to take a picture of this
stuff. They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less-
interesting metallic debris. The press was allowed to photograph this, but were
not allowed far enough into the room to touch it. The stuff in that one photo was
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. I was not in these. I believe these were taken with the
general and one of his aides. I've seen a lot of weather balloons, but I've never
seen one like that before. And I don't think they ever did either.

- Let's go back to how the press and radio people got involved. Can we go over
that again?

- It was the public information officer, Haut I believe his name was, who called
the AP and later wrote the press release. I heard he wasn't authorized to do this,
and I believe he was severely reprimanded for it, I think all the way from
Washington. We had calls from everywhere-all over the world. It was General
Ramey who put up the cover story about the balloon just to get the press off our
backs. The press was told it was just a balloon and that the flight to Wright-
Patterson was canceled; but all that really happened was that I was removed
from the flight and someone else took it up to W-P. I wasn't even allowed to talk
to the press except to say what the general had told me to say. They all wanted to
ask me questions, and I couldn't tell them anything.

- So what you're saying is that this whole weather-balloon thing was nothing but
a cover-up?
a cover-up?

- Well, one thing that I want to point out is that the newsmen saw very little of
the material-and none of the important things that had hieroglyphics, or
markings, on them. They didn't see that because it wasn't there. They wanted me
to tell them about it but I couldn't say anything. When the general came in he
told me not to say anything, that he would handle it. He told the newsmen: "Yes,
that's the weather balloon." So the newsmen had to take his word for it because
they had nothing else to go by. They tried to get me to talk about it, but the
general had told me not to say anything and I couldn't say anything. That's when
the general told me: "It's best you go back to Roswell. You have duties to
perform there. We'll handle it from here.... " [1]

In October 1947, just three months after the Roswell Incident, Marcel was
suddenly transferred to Washington, D.C., over Colonel Blanchard's objections.
Once there, he was quickly promoted to lieutenant colonel (in December) and
assigned to a Special Weapons Program that was busy collecting air samples
from throughout the world and analyzing them in an effort to detect whether the
Russians had exploded their first nuclear bomb. "When we finally detected that
there had been an atomic explosion, it was my job to write the report on it,"
related Marcel. "In fact, when President Truman went on the air to declare that
the Russians had exploded a nuclear device, it was my report that he was reading
from."

Upon being asked whether he knew if the Brazel-ranch wreckage was connected
with the report that a saucer had crashed near Socorro at about the same time,
Marcel answered:

- I heard about that but I could not verify such an occurrence from my own
experience. Of course, if another military group had become involved with a
larger piece of wreckage, there would be no reason for me to be informed about
it officially. All I can verify is what I saw and, I repeat, the material I saw came
from no weather balloon.

- Would anyone else remember anything about what you found on the Brazel
ranch?

- My son may remember something. He was about twelve then and he saw some
of the stuff we took from the site before it was packed off.

Major Marcel's son is now a doctor in Helena, Montana. As a young boy Dr.
Major Marcel's son is now a doctor in Helena, Montana. As a young boy Dr.
Marcel was naturally interested in flying and also in space travel. He was
fascinated by what his father had brought home and the reports that a vehicle and
wreckage from space had come down near the Roswell Base, but he did not have
much opportunity to examine it. Dr. Marcel remembers:

- Dad got a call to go out and investigate a downed aircraft or something like
that. He was gone a couple of days and returned with a van and part of a car
filled with wreckage and debris.

The material was foil-like stuff, very thin, metallic-like but not metal, and very
tough. There was also some structural-like material too-beams and so on. Also a
quantity of black plastic material which looked organic in nature.

Dad returned toward evening. He was gone all one night and most of the next
day. He had a 1942 Buick and a Carryall trailer, and both were loaded with this
material which was only a small fraction of the total material.

Dr. Marcel recalled that he was about eleven at this time. When asked if he had
managed to save a piece of this material, he replied:

- You know, I could have kicked myself a thousand times over for not doing so.
Dad said it was classified stuff and not to take any, so I didn't. But I sure wish I
had.

- Did Dr. Marcel recall hearing anything more about the incident after that?

- Yes. The story leaked out and we were bombarded with reporters, etc. I wasn't
too involved in this. My main impression was that the metal objects and strips
were from some kind of machine not a weather balloon. I was told that it was
some type of aircraft, but it wasn't any type we were familiar with-that's for sure.
Dad said that the speed of impact was not in keeping with any type of aircraft we
had at that time.

Several weeks later, in April 1979, Dr. Marcel remembered something else: “In
reference to the UFO incident of 1947 or 1948 I omitted one startling description
of the wreckage for fear it might have been the fanciful imagination of a twelve-
year-old. Imprinted along the edge of some of the beam remnants there were
hieroglyphic-type characters. I recently questioned my father about this, and he
recalled seeing these characters also, and even described them as being a pink or
purplish-pink color. Egyptian hieroglyphics would be a close visual description
purplish-pink color. Egyptian hieroglyphics would be a close visual description
of the characters seen, except I don't think there were any animal figures present
as there are in true Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I keep wondering if some remnants of the crash might still be lying on the New
Mexico desert floor. According to my father, some of it was left behind when he
and his crew investigated the air-crash site. I suspect, however, that after the true
nature of the craft became known to Air Force Intelligence, the whole site was
gone over with a vacuum cleaner.

As you know, my dad brought a portion of the wreckage into the house and
spread it over the kitchen floor, trying to piece some of the larger fragments
together. There were quite literally piles of metallic scrap along with bits of a
black, brittle residue that looked like plastic that had either melted or burned.
The task was hopeless because there was far too much debris for one kitchen
floor to hold.

I doubt if all the smaller fragments were picked up from the kitchen, and, indeed,
my mother remarked that some of it was probably swept out the back door.
About that time we poured a concrete slab around the back door for a patio. I
don't recall whether this was before or after the incident, but if it was shortly
after, what better way to preserve some of these fragments that were swept
away? [Chances of] recovery of anything would be vanishingly small, but not
zero...»

Although this would not be the first time in the chronicles of archaeology that
potentially and incalculably valuable shards or records had been unconsciously
destroyed, researchers would no doubt meet with some difficulties explaining to
the present owners of the then Marcel house the imperative need for breaking up
the patio piece by piece in order to locate writings from space.

Walter Haut, now the proprietor of the W. H. Art Gallery in Roswell, although
the base PIO at the time of the incident, was not a witness. His activities were
mainly limited to the uproar occasioned by the arrival of the apparently
interplanetary visitors. In interviews during March and June 1979, his
recollections ran as follows:

Lieutenant Haut was called by Colonel William Blanchard and directed to write
and distribute a news release to the effect that the AAF had recovered the
remains of a crashed flying disc. When he asked whether he could see the object
in question he was told by Colonel Blanchard that his request was impossible.
in question he was told by Colonel Blanchard that his request was impossible.
He wrote the story and distributed the release.

Haut was informed that Major Marcel had been on the plane that had taken the
recovered material to Fort Worth, but Haut did not go. He was ordered to stay
behind and "answer the telephone" (one remembers that he was only a
lieutenant) which he did continuously for the next eight hours, receiving calls for
information from all over the world, including one, he remembers, from Hong
Kong.

When Colonel Blanchard learned of this now international news explosion he

"hit the ceiling" and told Lieutenant Haut: "If there is any way you can get them
to shut up on it, then go ahead and do it." The pressure ceased when the "weather
balloon" story was issued from Fort Worth accompanied by General Ramey's
definitive denials to the press and over Radio WBAP from Fort Worth.

Haut resigned his commission in April 1948 on learning that he was about to be
transferred. (N.B. He was promoted to captain before he left the service.
However, he was not promoted before he signified his willingness to resign.) A
Sergeant Edward Gregory, who worked in the Public Information Office with
Lieutenant Haut at the time of the incident, observed in a phone interview with
Stan Friedman from his home at Livermore, California, that he never quite
understood why Lieutenant Haut had left the service and that if he had stayed in
the Air Force he would really have made it because he was exceptionally sharp.
Colonel Blanchard, Sergeant Gregory said, was "top-notch... first-rate, and
wouldn't have suggested any press release unless he was damn sure he wasn't
dealing with any weather balloon."

The series of denials of the first release might be considered a fairly normal
mistake and be excused on the grounds of a nationwide UFO "flap" at the time,
however far this would have taken the local command from the army tradition of
"no excuses-no explanations." But there were to be a variety of other direct and
indirect witnesses, and means would have to have been found, if the upper
echelons had decided to wipe out the story, to silence effectively the other
witnesses, either through ridicule or having them change their stories.

One person who should certainly have had firsthand information about the
alleged craft would be William W. "Mac" Brazel, the rancher who discovered
the strange pieces of wreckage on his land, and the person ultimately responsible
for bringing the entire matter to the attention of Major Marcel at Roswell.
for bringing the entire matter to the attention of Major Marcel at Roswell.
Although the elder Brazel died in 1963, his son and daughter-in-law, Bill and
Shirley Brazel of Capitan, New Mexico, recall the incident well. Bill Brazel is an
employee of Texas Instruments and spends the better part of his time working
away from home as a geoseismologist in Alaska's North Slope oil region.

Moore: (Interviews conducted in March, June, and December of 1979.)

Question: Mr. Brazel, what can you tell me about your father's experience in
discovering the wreckage of some sort of aerial device out on the ranch?

- Well, actually I can't tell you the whole story about that because I don't know
all of it. Father was very reluctant to talk about it at all, and what I know is only
what I could manage to get out of him over the years before he died. He took the
most part of what he knew to the grave with him. They [the military] swore him
to secrecy, 'you know, and he took that very seriously. A good indication of just
how seriously is that he would never even talk to Mother about it. To tell the
truth, Shirley here was the closest to him of any of the family and if he was
going to tell anyone at all about what he knew, it would have been her. But he
never told her the whole story either, so unless the military chooses to come out
in the open with what they know, we're likely never to find out any more about
it.

Actually, we first learned about it when we picked up a copy of the Albuquerque

Journal one evening and saw Dad's picture on the front page. There was another
story about it in the Lincoln County News. Shirley said: "My God, what's he got
himself into now?" and I said: "I don't know, but maybe we had better go over to
the ranch tomorrow and find out." We had just been married at the time and were
living in Albuquerque. Anyhow, when we got there Dad wasn't there. There was
nobody there. Well, we knew he was in Roswell from what the paper had said,
so I decided I had better stay and look after the ranch till he got home again.
Shirley went on back to Albuquerque that evening. By Monday [July 14] when
Dad still hadn't returned, I began to get concerned, and that was when I went
over to Corona and made a few phone calls to find out what was going on. I was
told not to worry, that Dad was O.K. and that he ought to be coming back to the
ranch in the next day or so.

Sure enough, he did, but when he got there, he wouldn't say hardly anything
about where he had been or what he had done there. He seemed very disgusted
about it all, and was in no mood to talk about it. "You saw that paper," he said.
"What you read there is all you need to know. That way, nobody will bother you
about it." Later on, he said that he had "found this thing and turned it in to
about it." Later on, he said that he had "found this thing and turned it in to
Roswell" and they shut him up for about a week because of it. I can still hear
him: "Gosh," he said, "I just tried to do a good deed and they put me in jail for
it." Then he said that if we had read it in the papers, then we knew all there was
to tell. He said they had told him to shut up because it was important to our
country and was the patriotic thing to do, and so that's what he intended to do.
He did say that they had shut him up in a room and wouldn't let him out. He was
very discouraged and upset about the way they had treated him. They even gave
him a complete "head-to-foot army physical" before they would let him come
home.

What I finally got out of him came in bits and pieces over the years, and from
what I can piece together, what happened was this:

Dad was in the ranch house with two of the younger kids late one evening when
a terrible lightning storm came up. He said it was the worst lightning storm he
had ever seen [and you can be sure he had seen a lot of them], not much rain
with it, just lightning-strike after strike. He said it seemed strange that the
lightning kept wanting to strike the same spots time and again, almost as if there
was something attracting it to those spots-he thought maybe underground
mineral deposits or something. Anyway, in the middle of this storm there was an
odd sort of explosion, not like the ordinary thunder, but different. He said he
didn't think too much about it at the time because the storm was so bad that he
just guessed it was some freak lightning strike, but later he wondered about it.
Anyhow, the next morning while riding out over the pasture to check on some
sheep, he came across this collection of wreckage scattered over a patch of land
about a quarter mile long or so, and several hundred feet wide. He said to me
once that it looked like that whatever this stuff had come from had blown up. He
also said that from the way this wreckage was scattered, you could tell it was
traveling "an airline route to Socorro," which is off to the southwest of the ranch.

At first he didn't recognize the importance of it, and it was only after a day or so
of thinking on it that he decided he had better go back and have a closer look.

It was then that he picked some of it up and brought it back to the ranch house.
That evening he went over and talked to Proctor [Floyd Proctor, Brazel's nearest
neighbor] about it. But Proctor wasn't interested in coming over to look at it, and
Dad was more curious than ever. The next night he went into Corona, and it was
then, during a discussion with my uncle, Hollis Wilson, and someone that he
knew from Alamogordo, that he first heard about the flying-saucer reports that
were sweeping this area at that time. Both Hollis and this other fellow from
were sweeping this area at that time. Both Hollis and this other fellow from
Alamogordo thought that there was a chance that Dad had picked up the pieces
of one of these things, and they advised him to go to the authorities with it. Dad
was still not convinced, but he knew this stuff was like nothing he had ever seen
before, so the next day he rounded up the two kids and took off for Roswell by
way of Tularosa, where he stopped off and left the kids with Mother. I believe
his original intention was to go to Roswell and buy a new Jeep pickup truck-he
certainly wouldn't have made the trip just on account of the .stuff he had found-
but I don't believe he bargained for what :he got himself into. One thing's for
sure, he didn't get the pickup on that trip anyhow.

Now some of the news reports have it that he went to Roswell to sell wool. I
don't know where they got that story, or some of the other information they
printed along with it, but I can say for sure that Dad never sold any wool in
Roswell. He always contracted for all his wool with some company up in Utah,
and they always picked up the wool at the ranch with their own trucks. Anyway,
I know he didn't go there to sell wool-it was about trading his pickup that he
went.

- Did he ever describe what he had found to you?

- No, not exactly; but then, he didn't need to since I had some of it myself. He
had showed me the place where this stuff had come down, but of course you
couldn't see anything there since the Air Force had had a whole platoon of men
out there picking up every piece and shred that they could find. Still, every time
I rode through that particular pasture I would make a point to look. Seems like
every time after a good rain I would manage to find a piece or two that they had
overlooked. After about a year and a half or two years I had managed to
accumulate quite a small collection-about enough that if you were to lay it out on
this tabletop it would take up about as much area as your briefcase there.

- Can you describe what you found?

- Yes, I can. There were several different types of stuff. Of course all I had was
small bits and pieces, but one thing that I can say about it was that it sure was
light in weight. It weighed almost nothing. There was some wooden-like
particles I picked up. These were like balsa wood in weight, but a bit darker in
color and much harder. You know the thing about wood is that the harder it gets,
the heavier it is. Mahogany, for example, is quite heavy. This stuff, on the other
hand, weighed nothing, yet you couldn't scratch it with your fingernail like
hand, weighed nothing, yet you couldn't scratch it with your fingernail like
ordinary balsa, and you couldn't break it either. It was pliable, but wouldn't
break. Of course, all I had was a few splinters. It never occurred to me to try to
burn it so I don't know if it would burn or not.

There were also several bits of a metal-like substance, something on the order of
tinfoil except that this stuff wouldn't tear and was actually a bit darker in color
than tinfoil-more like lead foil, except very thin and extremely lightweight. The
odd thing about this foil was that you could wrinkle it and lay it back down and
it immediately resumed its original shape. It was quite pliable, yet you couldn't
crease or bend it like ordinary metal. It was almost more like a plastic of some
sort, except that it was definitely metallic in nature. I don't know what it was, but
I do know that Dad once said the Army had told him that they had definitely
established it was not anything made by us.

Then there was some thread-like material. It looked like silk and there were
several pieces of it. It was not large enough to call it string, but yet not so small
as sewing thread either. To all appearances it was silk, except that it wasn't silk.
Whatever it was, it too was a very strong material. You could take it in two
hands and try to snap it, but it wouldn't snap at all. Nor did it have strands or
fibers like silk thread would have. This was more like a wire-all one piece or
substance. In fact, I suppose it could have been a sort of wire-that thought never
occurred to me before.

This stuff was something I had never seen the like of before. None of this stuff
had an exactly natural appearance about it, it was more like something synthetic
now that I think about it.

- Was there any writing or markings on any of the material you had?

- No, not on what I had. But Dad did say one time that there were what he called
"figures" on some of the pieces he found. He often referred to the petroglyphs
the ancient Indians drew on rocks around here as "figures" too, and I think that's
what he meant to compare them with.

- What ever became of this collection of yours? Do you still have it?

- Now that's the curious part of the story. No, I don't have it. One night about
two years after Dad's incident, I went into Corona for the evening. While I was
there, I guess I talked too much-more than I should have. I know I mentioned
having this collection to someone. Anyway, the next day a staff car came out to
having this collection to someone. Anyway, the next day a staff car came out to
the ranch from Roswell with a captain and three enlisted men in it. Dad was
away at the time; but it turned out they didn't want him anyway. They wanted
me. Seems the captain-Armstrong, I think his name was, Captain Armstrong-had
heard about my collection and asked to see it. Of course I showed it to him, and
he said that this stuff was important to the country's security and that it was most
important that I let him have it to take back with him. He seemed more interested
in the string-like stuff than in any of the rest of it. I didn't know what else to do,
so I agreed. Next he wanted me to take them out to the pasture where I had
found this stuff. I said O.K. and took them there. After they had poked around a
bit and satisfied themselves that there didn't appear to be any more'of the
material out there, the captain again asked me if I had any more of this material
or if I knew of anyone else who did. I said no,

I didn't; and he said that if I ever found any more that it was most important that
I call him at Roswell right away. Naturally I said I would, but I never did
because after that I never found any more.

- Could this material have been part of a balloon of some sort?

- No, I can answer that for sure. It was definitely not any kind of balloon. We've
picked up balloons all over this country and any time we found one we always
turned it in because there was sometimes a reward for them. This was no
balloon, although I once asked Dad if he ever found anything like an instrument
package connected with this stuff. He said no, there was no instrument package.

Strangely enough, when Dad first got into Roswell it was the weather bureau he
called first about this stuff he had found. It was the weather bureau that told him
he had better see the sheriff about it.

One more thing you might be interested in. One time I asked Dad whether there
was any burned spot on the ground where this wreckage was. He said no, but
that he had noticed on his second trip out there that some of the vegetation in the
area seemed to have been singed a bit at the very tips-not burned, just singed. I
don't recall seeing anything like that myself, but that's what he said.

- Did your father ever mention anything about any creatures connected with this
wreckage?

- No, Dad never mentioned anything like that, but it's curious you should ask.
There was a fellow who worked with me on a job in Alaska for a while who
There was a fellow who worked with me on a job in Alaska for a while who
seemed to know something about that. We were talking about a number of things
one evening and the topic of that flying saucer that was supposed to have
touched down for a while on the Alaskan tundra came up. I mentioned to him
about what Dad had been involved in, and to my surprise he asked me if I
wanted to know more about that. Then he said that they had discovered the rest
of that thing after it had come down in a desert area, and that there were some
creatures found with it. He told me that when they had got inside of this wrecked
saucer, that two of these creatures-he said they were about three and a half or
four feet tall and bald-were still alive but that their throats had been badly burned
from inhaling burning gases or fumes or something, and that they couldn't
communicate. He said they were taken to California and kept alive on respirators
for a period of time afterwards, but that both had died before we could figure out
how to communicate effectively with them. This fellow's name was Lamme, and
he told me the names of two other men who had been involved with this
incident, but I can't recall what names they were right now. That's really all I can
tell you on that one, except that it sure surprised me to hear such a story.

As we have already noted, Bill Brazel's father died in 1963, unfortunately

without making any further statements to the press, and almost certainly without
knowing anything about the little men to whom the wreckage he had found may
have once belonged. Even so, in his years of silence, he must have had occasion
to wonder why, if the incident really had cosmic importance, it was not later
explained. He was certainly not the only one so to wonder.

Floyd Proctor was Brazel's closest neighbor. He lived about eight miles or so
from the Brazel house, and when interviewed (Moore, June 1979) recalled the
incident very well.

- Brazel had come over to my place late one afternoon all excited about finding
some sort of wreckage on his ranch. He wanted me to come over with him and
look at it, and described it as "the strangest stuff he had ever seen." I was tired
and busy and just didn't want to bother going all that way over there right then.
You know he tried, he really tried to get us to go down there and look at it.

- What did Brazel say about it?

- He was in a talkative mood, which was rare for him, and just wouldn't shut up
about it. He described the stuff as being very odd. He said whatever the junk
was, it had designs on it that reminded him of Chinese and Japanese designs. It
was, it had designs on it that reminded him of Chinese and Japanese designs. It
wasn't paper because he couldn't cut it with his knife, and the metal was different
from anything he had ever seen. He said the designs looked like the kind of stuff
you would find on firecracker wrappers... some sort of figures all done up in
pastels, but not writing like we would do it.

- Do you know what he did with it?

- We suggested that he take it to Roswell... and the next thing we knew he was in
Roswell. They kept him there about a week, under guard. He was real talkative
about that stuff until he came back; then he wouldn't say much at all. He seemed
to find something else to talk about. He wouldn't say anything except that they
had told him it was some sort of balloon. Anyway, they kept Mac down there
several days and they sent a crew up here and hauled everything away. Then
they brought Brazel back on a plane.

- Did he say anything more about his stay on the base?

- I don't know what they did to him down there in Roswell, but I do know that L.
D. Sparks [a former neighbor] and I saw him down there in Roswell when we
were in town one time, and he was all surrounded by military men, at least half a
dozen, and walked right past us like he didn't even know us.

When asked how many men came out to pick up the pieces, Proctor said he
didn't know. He said the location of the crash site was seven and a half or eight
miles from the old Foster place (Brazel's ranch house-now torn down) in a
pasture used for sheep grazing. He said the land is now occupied by a family
named Chavez.

At about this point in the interview, Proctor's wife came into the room and, after
realizing what was being talked about, volunteered some interesting information.
Mrs. Proctor's brother, Robert R. Porter of Great Falls, Montana, was one of the
men on the plane that flew the wreckage to Carswell AFB in Fort Worth on its
way to Wright-Patterson Field in Ohio. She recalls Porter saying that he had
asked several of the other men on the flight what all the secrecy was about and
whether the material they had under wraps in the cargo hold was really a flying
saucer. He was told: "That's just what it is and don't ask any more questions." He
added that he didn't know for sure whether it was Brazel's material or something
else. Porter confirmed his sister's account via a telephone interview in mid-July
1979 and also added that whatever was in the cargo hold was escorted by an
1979 and also added that whatever was in the cargo hold was escorted by an
armed guard which had been assigned to it at Roswell.

Brazel's elder sister, Lorraine Ferguson, lives in Capitan, New Mexico, and, at
the age of eighty-three, is an active woman who has no trouble with her memory.
When Moore called on her in June 1979 she was hoeing the garden alongside her
house, wearing the large sunbonnet typical of the "Old West." In a bit of
preinterview reminiscence she informed Moore that her father's first cousin was
Wayne Brazel - the man who killed Pat Garrett, who, for his part, had already
attained considerable fame for having killed Billy the Kid.

Question: Why was William Brayl called Mac? - We used to call him Mac
because, when he was a baby, he looked just like President McKinley.

- Do you remember a story about something crashing on Mac's ranch at Corona?

- Sure, I remember, but Mac was extremely reluctant to talk about it. He said he
didn't want any great fuss about it, but of course there was anyhow. Whatever he
found it was all in pieces and some of it had some kind of unusual writing on it -
Mac said it was like the kind of stuff you find all over Japanese or Chinese
firecrackers; not really writing, just wiggles and such. Of course, he couldn't
read it and neither could anybody else as far as I ever heard.... Everybody up
there by the ranch knew about it, but as far as I know nobody ever identified
what it was or what its purpose might have been. At first they called it a weather
balloon, but of course it wasn't that.... Mac didn't ever like to be in the limelight,
so he just naturally tried to avoid talking about it. Also, of course, the Air Force
people had told him to be quiet too.

The unusual pictorial figures on the remnants of the foil, which, if part of a UFO,
would be our first glimpse of extraterrestrial writing, again came up in a July
1979 interview with Bessie Brazel Schreiber, Mac Brazel's daughter.

Although she was only twelve years old at the time, the crash of a strange object
on her father's ranch made a strong impression on her. She described the
wreckage as "so much debris scattered over pastureland. There was what
appeared to be pieces of heavily waxed paper and a sort of aluminum-like foil.
Some of these pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but
there were no words that we were able to make out. Some of the metal-foil
pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them, and when these were held to the light
they showed what looked like pastel flowers or designs. Even though the stuff
looked like tape it could not be peeled off or removed at all. It was very light in
looked like tape it could not be peeled off or removed at all. It was very light in
weight but there sure was a lot of it."

Question: What happened when your father took some of this stuff into town to
show the authorities?

- We were with him in Roswell but we didn't go with him to see these people. He
went to the sheriff's department first and they sent him to the military. They
talked to Dad all day. The following day we were descended upon by military
people and news people. We were told not to talk about this at all. Back in those
days when the military told you not to talk about something, it wasn't discussed.

- Do you remember what this so-called writing looked like?

- Yes. It looked like numbers mostly, at least I assumed them to be numbers.

They were written out like you would write numbers in columns to do an
addition problem. But they didn't look like the numbers we use at all. What gave
me the idea they were numbers, I guess, was the way they were all ranged out in
columns.

- Could the object have been the remains of a weather balloon?

- No, it was definitely not a balloon. We had seen weather balloons quite a lot-
both on the ground and in the air. We had even found a couple of Japanese-style
balloons that had come down in the area once. We had also picked up a couple
of those thin rubber weather balloons with instrument packages. This was
nothing like that. I have never seen anything resembling this sort of thing before-
or since.... We never found any other pieces of it afterwards-after the military
was there. Of course we were out there quite a lot over the years, but we never
found so much as a shred. The military scraped it all up pretty well.

Finally, there is the question and sequence of Brazel's interview by KGFL Radio
of Roswell, New Mexico. He was allegedly interviewed at the time of the
incident on a wire recorder by W. E. Whitmore, then owner of KGFL, who
planned to use the information as a "scoop" on the Mutual wire. W. E. Whitmore
is now dead, but his son, Walt Whitmore, Jr., remembers that his father hid
Brazel at the Whitmore home to keep the interview exclusive. At the very
moment of the interview the Army, according to Whitmore, was "having a fit"
because they could not locate the "rancher who had found the flying saucer."
Whitmore added that he did not know what happened to the rancher after he left
the Whitmore home but assumed that the Air Force "caught up with him and put
the Whitmore home but assumed that the Air Force "caught up with him and put
him out of circulation."

When Whitmore, Sr., had recorded the story and tried to get it on the Mutual
wire, he was unable to get the call-through. Meanwhile he began broadcasting a
preliminary release locally over KGFL. At this point, however, a long-distance
person-to-person phone call came through to the station from a man named
Slowie, who identified himself as Secretary of the Federal Communications
Commission in Washington, D.C. Slowie informed Whitmore, in a tone of voice
that seemed to permit no further discussion, that the matter involved national
security and that if Whitmore valued his FCC broadcasting license he would
cease transmitting this story at once and forget that he had ever heard about it.
While Whitmore, now concerned that he was onto something of cosmic
importance, was trying to decide what to do next, a second call from Washington
came through-this one from a senatorial level-from Senator Chavez of New
Mexico, then chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
Chavez suggested persuasively that Whitmore, Sr., had better do what Slowie
advised and to obey the FCC directive. Whitmore complied with alacrity.

Whitmore, Jr., said that while he did not see the actual crash site until after the
Army Air Force had "cleaned it up," he did see some of the wreckage brought
into town by the rancher. His description was that it consisted mostly of a very
thin but extremely tough metallic foil-like substance and some small beams that
appeared to be either wood or wood-like. Some of this material had a sort of
writing on it which looked like numbers that had been either added or multiplied.
He recalls that his father went out to the site in a Buick but was turned back by
armed MPs who had set up a road block. Several other people from town tried to
get out there but were stopped by guards, who told them that the area was
blocked off because of a "Top Secret" project.

Several days later Whitmore, Jr., ventured out to the site and found a stretch of
about 175-200 yards ofpastureland uprooted in a sort of fan-like pattern with
most of the damage at the narrowest part of the fan. He said that whatever it was
"just cleaned it [the area] out... The Army Air Force searched around out there
for two days and cleaned out everything. I recall hearing that everything was
taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio after the Army Air Force had
tried to piece the stuff together in Roswell. No one I talked to seemed to know
exactly what it was, but I heard the 'flying saucer' explanation talked about quite
a bit."
He added that the largest piece of this material that he saw was about four or five
inches square, and that it was very much like lead foil in appearance but could
not be torn or cut at all. It was extremely light in weight.

Walt Whitmore, Jr., remembers and sympathizes with Lieutenant Haut, then
base I.0.: "The information officer out here at Walker [Roswell Army Air Base
is now called Walker AFB] sure got his tail in a crack over this thing. He should
never have released that story that they had picked up a saucer. He was here at
the base for only a short time after that-matter of months maybe-and then they
shipped him out."

Based on the information we have obtained thus far, we can postulate a tentative
picture of the sequence of events and discovery. At between 9:45 and 9:50 P.M.
on the evening of July 2, 1947, what appeared to be a flying saucer passed over
Roswell heading northwest at a high rate of speed, as witnessed by the Wilmots.
Somewhere north of Roswell, the saucer ran into the lightning storm witnessed
by Brazel, made a course correction to the south-southwest, was struck by a
lightning bolt, and suffered severe on-board damage. A great quantity of
wreckage was blown out over the ground, but the saucer itself, although stricken,
managed to remain in the air for at least long enough to get over the mountains
before crashing violently to the ground in the area west of Socorro known as the
Plains of San Agustin. The wreckage that had fallen on the Brazel ranch was
discovered the next morning by Brazel as he was riding over his pasture, and
only after that was Major Marcel of Roswell Army Air Base alerted. In the case
of the saucer itself and its ill-fated crew, it had by chance come down near the
spot where Barnett was scheduled to do a survey job the next morning and the
archaeology students were scheduled to begin their dig.

At the second site on the Plains of San Agustin in Catron County, the military
took over more quickly than at the first because of the delay involved between
the time Brazel discovered the wreckage and the time he finally reported it to the
authorities. Although the sequence of events at the San Agustin site had taken
place several days before those at the Brazel ranch and in Roswell, news leaks
from the San Agustin site were more effectively plugged and information
coming in to media sources was slow to arrive and sketchy at best. As a result,
even though this first military intervention did not come from the Roswell base,
the early reports on the radio and in the press, in their confusion, assumed there
was only one site and quite understandably referred only to the first site of the
wreckage, which had received considerably more publicity because of Haul's
premature news release. (One actually begins to wonder at this point whether
premature news release. (One actually begins to wonder at this point whether
Haut might have been ordered to leak the Roswell story to the press and write
his news release specifically for the purpose of diverting attention away from the
San Agustin incident.) In any event, indications are that the military group at the
San Agustin site came from the air base at Alamogordo on the White Sands
Proving Grounds, and that the secrecy involved here was far greater than at
Roswell.

Even so, military communications were apparently working well at a high level,
for a hastily assembled scientific-military expedition was, according to an
alleged participant, sent to Muroc Air Base in California to meet the train which
was to bring them the recovered wreckage and bodies (and possibly the two
survivors as well).

This hastily assembled military-scientific group may have furnished the first
approximate physical description of the occupants of the saucer and answered
the question as to whether "they" were unlucky human test pilots or travelers
from another world who had found their final destination on ours.
5 Descriptions of the Aliens
Meade Layne, now deceased, former director of Borderland Sciences Research
Foundation, Vista, California, made some memos, probably in 1949, concerning
reports on some of the alleged participants in this scientific "call-up." A memo
has been furnished by Mr. Reilly Crabb, present director of Borderland Sciences
Research Foundation.

Layne's memo states that "on the basis of present information" he accepted the
facts of the story as authentic. Of his sources, he said that his "most direct
information involves three informants, two of whom are scientists of distinction,
and the third a business man of high standing.

“One of the scientists, a Dr. Weisberg, a physics professor from a California

university, saw the disc himself and took part in the examination of it. He says
the disc was shaped like a turtle's back, with a cabin space some Fifteen feet in
diameter. The bodies of six occupants were seared... and the interior of the disc
had been badly damaged by intense heat. One porthole had been shattered....

An autopsy on one body showed that it resembled a normal human body except
in size. One body was seated at what appeared to be a control desk, there were a
few 'gadgets' in front of him, and on the walls or panels were characters in
writing, in a language unknown to any of the investigators. They said it was
unlike anything known to them, and was definitely not Russian. There was no
propeller and no motor and they could not understand how it was driven or
controlled. It was considered possible that the disc was wrecked by heat of
friction with the atmosphere..."

Dr. Weisberg's other testimony is especially interesting in that he suggests how

the UFO got to its destination at Edwards Air Force Base. According to his
recollection, it was taken by truck to Magdalena, in Guadalupe County, where it
was put on a special car of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, which had been
brought down from Vaughn. It was "kept under wraps" passing through Belen,
Grants, and Galiup in New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona, to Needles and Cadiz in
California and finally to Muroc, where Camp Edwards is located.

While we cannot be certain which material went to Fort Worth and which to
Muroc, apparently shipments in both directions took place: the disc and its
occupants to Muroc and the unusual wreckage to Fort Worth, and then on to
occupants to Muroc and the unusual wreckage to Fort Worth, and then on to
Wright Field in Ohio. There are even persistent rumors that, sometime in the
mid-1950s, presumably after an alleged viewing by President Eisenhower of the
material and bodies at Edwards, they were reunited under one roof inside a
structure referred to only as "Building 18-A, Area B" at Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base. (Requests to Wright-Patterson for information about the contents of
Building 18-A are usually answered by the reply that there is no Building 18-A.)
Later, again according to rumor, the Air Force in early 1978 reacted to
increasing public pressure for disclosure by moving the carefully preserved
bodies and some of the wreckage by Guppie aircraft to a specially constructed
and guarded warehouse located on the CIA compound at Langley, Virginia. The
remainder was shipped under heavy guard to McDill Air Force Base, Florida-
where presumably it is still held, although not for public viewing.

A further and rather unusual type of corroboration that something significant

was indeed recovered comes from the case of Baron Nicholas von Poppen, a
Baltic German refugee nobleman from Estonia. Von Poppen had developed a
system of photographic metallurgical analysis and was working in the Los
Angeles area as an industrial photographer, concentrating primarily on the
aircraft industry. According to statements quoted by Gray Barker {UFO Report,
May 1977) a longtime investigator of UFOs and owner of the appropriately
named Saucerian Press, Clarksburg, West Virginia, von Poppen was employed
by military authorities to photograph the damaged saucer (by this time "flying
saucer" had become part of current vocabulary).

The salient points of von Poppen's account are startling. On a certain unspecified
date in the late 1940s, he was visited by two military intelligence representatives
who offered him a top-secret photographic assignment at an exceptionally high
fee, but with the proviso that he would immediately be deported if he revealed
anything that he saw or photographed. Subsequently the agents escorted him by
plane to an air base which, he was told, was Los Alamos (but which could have
been Edwards since there was no air base at Los Alamos). He was taken to a
large object which resembled the popular concept of a flying saucer. He stayed
at the base for several days, photographing the object, his film being taken from
the camera by military representatives as each film was completed. According to
his recollection, he took hundreds of pictures. In the close-up shots he was told
that it was important to show the texture of the metal.

Von Poppen thought that the machine was about thirty feet in diameter and the
interior cabin about twenty feet in diameter with a curving ceiling. Between the
interior cabin about twenty feet in diameter with a curving ceiling. Between the
inner cabin and the outside there was space for cables made of unfamiliar metals
or alloys. In this main cabin there were four seats in front of a control board,
which was "covered with push buttons and tiny levers." Plastic sheets covered
with symbols lay scattered on the control board and on the floor.

Still strapped in each of the four seats was a dead body, extremely thin and
varying in height from about two to four feet (a striking similarity to the
extraterrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). As quoted by Gray
Barker, von Poppen stated:

“The faces of all four were very white.... [They wore] shiny black attire, one-
piece outfits without pockets and closely gathered at their feet and necks.... Their
shoes... were made of the same material and appeared to be very soft-not rigid....
Their hands were human-like though soft, like those of children, complete with
five digits, normal-looking joints, and neatly trimmed nails...”

As von Poppen had been employed to photograph metals and not

extraterrestrials, he was discouraged from too close examination of the
surprising crew of the craft. (Until he saw the occupants von Poppen had thought
that the craft, with its attendant high classification, had been a top-secret air
force project.)

As he continued for several days to photograph the spaceship (but not the
bodies) his scientific curiosity overcame the warnings he had received about
taking souvenirs. He attempted to collect something from the craft, but was later
betrayed by a crucial beep at a checkpoint and as a result was relieved of the
object. Finally von Poppen was taken back to Los Angeles by escort from the
area identified as Los Alamos. Before he left he heard rumors that the craft was
to be transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

Although unsuccessful in separating any parts of the craft for further study or
further photography, von Poppen was successful in hiding or later obtaining one
print, a view of the crashed saucer. He kept the negative in a securely guarded
envelope to be opened at the time of his death or, as expressed in von Poppen's
own guarded words, "in case something should happen to me."

Von Poppen died in Hollywood in the summer of 1975 at the age of nearly
ninety, but no trace of the photograph in question has ever been found. If von
Poppen secreted it away in a safe-deposit box, then perhaps it reposes there still,
and if ever found by an unsuspecting bank official, will doubtlessly not be
and if ever found by an unsuspecting bank official, will doubtlessly not be
recognized for what it is. Len H. Stringfield is a longtime UFO investigator, the
author of Situation Red, the UFO Siege (Doubleday, 1977), a researcher, and is
director of public relations for Du Bois Chemicals, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Stringfield, in an interview with Moore in July 1979, stated that his son-in-law,
Jeffry Sparks, an assistant professor of theater arts at St. Leo's College, Dade
City, Florida, had spoken with a person who claimed to have witnessed bodies of
alien humanoid creatures at Wright-Patterson AFB sometime during 1966.
Sparks relayed his contact's name to Stringfield, who subsequently spoke at
length with this witness on July 5, 1978.

The individual involved, identified at his request because of security regulations

as J.K., currently holds a responsible position with a private firm in Tampa,
Florida. From 1966 to 1968, J.K. served as military intelligence officer with
Nike Missile Air Intelligence (ADCAP) at Wright-Patterson.

While he was at Wright-Patterson, J.K. claims to have observed bodies of nine

deceased aliens preserved under deepfreeze conditions in well-lighted, thick-
glass enclosures. He described the bodies as short in stature, about four feet in
height, and with what appeared under the lighting conditions to be a grayish
skin. The research area where these bodies were preserved was constantly under
heavy guard both inside and out.

While he was viewing the bodies, J.K. was told that there were no fewer than
thirty such preserved at Wright-Patterson. Although he saw the bodies he did not
actually see any alien craft at the base, but was informed that there were such
craft there and also at Langley AFB and McDill AFB in Florida.

According to J.K., highly trained mobilized units are held at certain military
bases in a constant ready state for dispatch to any area in the United States to
recover downed or crashed UFOs. He also related that "since 1948 secret
information concerning UFO activity involving the U.S. military has been
contained in a computer center at Wright-Patterson" and that "duplicate support
back-up files" are secretly kept at other selected military installations.

The above statements are partially confirmed by Edward Gregory of Livermore,

California, who worked on the P.R. staff at Roswell AAFB under Lieutenant
Haut in 1947. (See Chapter 4.) Gregory eventually was transferred to the 3602d
Squadron USAF whose assignment it was to investigate UFO reports for the Air
Force, the reports going straight to Air Defense Command Headquarters.
Force, the reports going straight to Air Defense Command Headquarters.
Gregory stated in a telephone interview with Stan Fnedman that there were
highly trained three-man teams ready to go at any time to any suspected UFO
crash site. According to Gregory, during his time in the 3602d, these teams were
called out several times on alleged UFO crashes.

Among many researchers of the Roswell Incident, Len Stringfield has been
especially concerned about the physical appearance of the occupants of the so-
called flying disc. He has been able, in the course of his investigations, to speak
with doctors (unidentified at their urgent request) who were summoned by
governmental agencies in the early fifties and employed in what was apparently
a new series of autopsies, pursuant to whatever autopsies were made in 1947.
One wonders why a new series of autopsies was called for: perhaps for
comparison data or a renewal of interest in the alleged alien bodies, which,
according to Stringfield, were kept in formaldehyde between autopsies-and still
are. Further intensive research is being carried out in at least two major medical
centers in the United States.

Stringfield reports incomplete overall information and opinions inasmuch as

physicians with varying areas of specialization were utilized for different parts
of the autopsy procedures. Thus no single source has more than a small portion
of the relevant data at his disposal should he choose to break security to talk
about it.

Certain information collected from several medical informants form a general

impression of humanoid physical beings, partially described as follows:

Approximate height between three and a half and four and a half feet.

The head, by human standards, is oversize in relation to torso and limbs.

Although brain capacity has not been specified it is considerably larger
comparatively than that possessed by human beings.

Head and body are hairless although some report a slight fuzz on pate.

Eyes are large and deep-set or sunken, far apart, and slightly slanted.
No ear lobes or extending flesh beyond apertures noted on each side of the
head.
Nose is formless, with nares indicated by only a slight protuberance.
 Mouth is a small slit which may not function as an orifice for food
ingestion. No mention of teeth was made by Stringfield's informants.

Neck is relatively thin.

Arms and legs are extremely thin, with arms reaching nearly to knee
sections.

Hands show four fingers and no thumb, with two fingers double the length
of the others. Fingernails are elongated. A slight webbing effect exists
between the fingers.

Skin of tough texture and grayish. Skin on some preserved bodies appeared
dark brown, evidently charred.

Blood is liquid but not similar to human blood by color or any known blood
type.

There were conflicting reports on reproductive organs, with some observers

reporting no distinguishing sex characteristics while others stated that there
were distinctive male and female bodies sexually comparable to those of
human beings. (Although Barnett thought all the bodies he saw were male.)
Reports on internal organs were not made available to Stringfield.

It seems fairly evident that incomplete reports such as the above may have come
from doctors who feared to say too ; much or from laboratory attendants who did
not have sufficient information to give a more complete picture. (One almost
incomprehensible feature of an advanced technological race would be four
fingers and no thumb, the prehensile thumb being basically the principal
physical advantage over the animals-unless of course the first of the four fingers
was long and pliable enough to serve as a thumb.) However, the description of
the hand itself may have represented an imperfect memory of a laboratory
assistant who saw the long fingers folded over the thumb and counted only four.
This at least is one possible explanation for the apparent discrepancy between
Stringfield's information and von Poppen's account of the aliens. It is interesting
to note that the aliens portrayed on board the UFO in the film Close Encounters
of the Third Kind closely resemble the composite description compiled by
researcher Springfield. This is probably not an example of "art imitating nature"
but rather due to the fact that Dr. J. Alien Hynek, Northwestern University
astronomer and director of the Center for UFO Studies, a consultant on the film,
had access to various reports on the alleged characteristics of some examples of
had access to various reports on the alleged characteristics of some examples of
extraterrestrials.

In like manner, the subsequent "underground" reports from high-security areas

on the presence there and descriptions of the bodies of the saucer occupants as
they were shuttled from one military base to another around the country, while
differing in some particulars, nevertheless offer a description consistent enough
to be considered fairly corroborative.

If the validity of the various descriptive reports is debatable one must still admit
that the features of head enlargement, hairlessness, muscle deterioration,
elongation of arms, loss of height, etc., might be said to be a perceptive guess of
how we will look in the far future, the point from which the "aliens" may
conceivably have come. It appears unlikely that the same stories should surface
in so many places apparently unrelated except by the "journey in death" of the
alien crew.
6 Holes in the Cover-up
Despite the efforts of the AAF and thereafter the government to keep the entire
matter (and their own research concerning the craft and its crew) under high-
security classification, rumors have continued to surface throughout the years,
sometimes from Edwards Air Force Base, sometimes from the Pentagon, or from
Langley, Virginia (CIA headquarters). Some of these rumors come from security
personnel who have been transferred to other duties or have retired and therefore
tend to consider the matter with a mixture of nostalgia and permissiveness. The
rumors sometimes corroborate and sometimes add new material.

Almost from the time of the original incident there has always been the
expectation that disclosure of the mysterious events in Roswell would be made
within a relatively short period of time. Norman Bean, Miami, Florida,
electronics engineer, inventor, and lecturer on UFOs, remembers an incident that
took place in the mid-fifties. After a lecture he had just given he had a
conversation with a retired air force officer, a Colonel Lake, who informed him
that a close friend had talked to a doctor in Dayton, Ohio, at some length about
the autopsies of the "saucer" crew in which he had participated. According to
Colonel Lake, the internal organs were similar to those of human beings, with
basic organs "just like chickens and people." Colonel Lake, naturally aware of
security regulations, said he could talk about this now in a general way because
"all this is going to be a matter of public information in a few months."

Nothing, of course, has yet been officially disclosed. However, numerous lower-
echelon disclosures have continued to surface, sometimes contradictory but in
general agreement. These confidential disclosures usually come from military
guards, personnel involved in the transportation of the bodies, doctors or autopsy
assistants, clerks, and occasionally individuals unconnected with the project who
somehow stumble on the not-so-secret secret.

A chance meeting on a train revealed some specific details, somewhat at odds

with other descriptions of the aliens. Bill Devlin, an employee of a radio and
television servicing company, en route in the spring of 1952 to Washington from
Philadelphia, found a vacant seat next to a soldier who was reading a
Philadelphia newspaper. Devlin was especially intrigued by an article the soldier
was reading concerning a wave of UFO sightings over the Main Line of
Philadelphia. Noting the interest of Devlin, who was reading over his shoulder,
the soldier said: "This article here. I could tell you a lot more about this if you
the soldier said: "This article here. I could tell you a lot more about this if you
are interested." Upon assurance from Devlin that he was extremely interested,
the soldier told him that he was one of three drivers who took the remains of a
saucer from Aztec, New Mexico, to Fort Riley, Kansas, in a truck convoy
consisting of three trucks. During the operation the soldier had seen the bodies
and noted that they were very small, all dressed alike in close-fitting stretch
garments, that they had human features (including teeth), and yellowish skin-
somewhat "fuzzy," like a peach. They appeared to be male and female, as one of
the figures "had bump's in the right places." He thought he counted "sixteen or
so" small bodies, but did not know how many there actually were.

While such an account may seem somewhat unreliable at first glance, it may in
fact be entirely accurate, although unfortunately we are forced to rely on rumor
again as our best source of evidence. In this case, one crashed-saucer rumor that
has circulated without appreciable change since the early 1950s has it that a
small portion of the wreckage along with some of the bodies was transferred by
truck convoy from Muroc to Wright Field about a year or so after the crash.
According to this story, this was accomplished using three teams of drivers and
escorts, each of which was responsible for moving the convoy only a part of the
distance before turning their vehicles over to the next group at a specified
rendezvous point. None of the groups knew anything specific about what they
were carrying.

If this rumor is true, then several other seemingly incomprehensible pieces begin
to fall into place. In the late 1940s, before the advent of interstate highways and
high-powered trucks, it would have been likely that those responsible for the
logistics of such an operation would have chosen a southern route to avoid the
highest parts of the Rockies, and then charted a gradual northeasternly course
across the Great Plains to Ohio. Is it possible that the rendezvous points along
such a route were Aztec, New Mexico, Fort Riley, Kansas, and Godman Field,
Kentucky? The four (counting Muroc) points are certainly about equidistant
from one another and would, in the 1940s, have had the advantage of being
along roads which were out of the way enough to avoid attracting undue
attention. The final leg of the trip from Godman to Wright Field could easily
have been accomplished by a special crew from Wright Field itself.

Yet another advantage to such a conjecture is that it offers a possible explanation

of how Frank Scully, in his poorly researched 1950 book Behind the Flying
Saucers, erroneously concluded that Aztec, New Mexico, had actually been the
site of the crash. Of course, the rumor doesn't end here.
site of the crash. Of course, the rumor doesn't end here.

More rumors follow at Fort Riley. There an MP on sentry duty saw a delivery
into a building, at which he had been assigned to guard duty, consisting of
several wooden crates containing figures covered with sheets with what
appeared to be dry ice on the top. The figures seemed to be about four feet long,
maybe less. While he was on guard duty, a general entered with other officers
and, according to the sentry, upon leaving told him to "shoot anyone
[unauthorized] who tried to enter." The sentry did not know what the bodies
were, but later heard in barracks that they were the crew of the disc that had
crashed in New Mexico.

There were a variety of reports from Edwards Air Force Base, all unattributed
but quite persistent. It is interesting to note as a mark of the efficiency of
security, regulations that two of the informants were adamant not only in
refusing the use of their names but even to having Edwards AFB mentioned lest
their connection with the security force lead to their detection. One MP confided
to a relative, and later to the author, that the bodies kept at Edwards were
separated, some being kept "on ice" at Edwards and others sent to Washington
for further dissection. A CID (Criminal Investigation Division) agent, in
speaking of a "crashed UFO kept at Edwards," mentioned that a special technical
research team studied the artifact for months but were unable to cut into the
metal for purposes of examination and molecular or atomic identification.

A report from "an inside source" of what may be the "saucer's" latest stop, at
CIA headquarters, Langley Field, Virginia, indicates that the crashed disc is still
there and that "IBM is working on it and they can't figure out how it operates."
As far as construction is concerned, it appears to be along the tongue-in-groove
system rather than riveted and welded.

Another more detailed account of the presence at Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base comes from a base civilian employee through Charles Wilhelm, a UFO
investigator and contact of Len Stringfleld. The one-time base employee, Mrs.
Norma Gardner, had retired for health reasons in 1959 and was living alone in
Price Hill, Cincinnati. Charles Wilhelm, then a teenager, had been working at
odd repair and upkeep jobs for Mrs. Gardner and in the course of their
acquaintance had spoken to her about his interest in UFOs, which he soon
realized she shared.

When Mrs. Gardner's health worsened, Wilhelm continued to visit her. On one
visit, according to Wilhelm, she confided to him some rather startling
visit, according to Wilhelm, she confided to him some rather startling
information about her own knowledge of salvaged UFOs and alien bodies at the
base. She said that while she was working at Wright-Patterson in 1955, she had
been assigned to a post which involved the cataloguing of all incoming UFO-
related material. She was given a top security clearance and, in the course of her
duties, processed over 1,000 separate items, including parts from the interior of a
recovered UFO which had been brought to the air base some time in the past. All
items, she said, had been carefully photographed and tagged. In 1955 she visited
an off-limits hangar and saw two saucer-like craft, one apparently intact and the
other damaged.

At one point during the course of her assignment, she said, she had witnessed the
conveyance of two humanoid bodies by cart from one room to another. She not
only saw the bodies but personally handled the paper work on their autopsy
reports. These bodies, preserved in some type of chemical solution, were
between four and five feet tall, with generally human-like features except that
the heads were large relative to the bodies and the eyes were slanted. She did not
know whether the bodies had been brought in from a recent crash or had been on
the base from some previous incident.

Mrs. Gardner told Wilhelm of her experiences when she was bedridden with
cancer. So convinced was she that she would not recover that she apparently had
second thoughts about security regulations, observing dramatically, "Uncle Sam
can't do anything to me when I'm in my grave."

Among the more startling of the many rumors concerning the crashed disc is the
one that suggests that the object was brought down by air force action, perhaps
accidentally, through radar interference with the operational technology of the
disc.

The above supposition, however, would seem to be negated by the many air
force and FAA reports of instances when a good radar UFO lock-on failed to
modify its flight plan and/or the distressing ability ofUFOs simply to disappear,
as if passing swiftly into another dimension where radar cannot follow them.

In 1956 an RB-47 reconnaissance plane, especially equipped with electronic

radar gear, was followed by a UFO for more than an hour over the Gulf of
Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and finally Oklahoma before it finally
disappeared. If radar could affect the operation of UFOs, this would have been a
case in point, unless, of course, more recent UFOs possess counterdevices.
The concept of challenge, combat, or conquest, certainly a consideration always
present on an earthly level, has naturally been extended by earthly thinkers to
UFOs and their possible intentions. For this reason it is relatively easy for one to
explain the increasingly numerous sightings of UFOs from 1947 on, and, too,
extraterrestrial curiosity about what was going on at White Sands and how far
the denizens of a relatively minor planet were progressing in unleashing, for
good or bad, the latent powers of the universe.

It seems unlikely, therefore, that the Roswell UFO was brought down, either
accidentally or on purpose, by any activity of our military forces. Far more likely
is the conjecture that the disc was struck by a lightning bolt, as seems to be
indicated in Brazel's story. The speed with which the Army Air Force arrived on
the scene of the San Agustin wreckage can easily be explained by the fact that
either White Sands radar or a military or commercial aircraft in flight could have
spotted the object going down the night before and naturally assumed it was
some conventional craft out of control and suffering communication difficulties.
The first military men on the scene could very well have been nothing more than
part of a search and rescue team directed to the site by an aircraft spotter. When
they realized what they had found, the news began, like the waves from a stone
dropped into a pond, rapidly to increase in area, from the base to the state, the
nation, and the world, until a command decision was taken to establish that
nothing unusual had happened at all.

But the above selection of credible and incredible rumors, scuttlebutt,

"confidential" reports, and twice-told tales, fantastic though they may seem,
often corroborate the original precensorship radio and press reports as well as the
testimony of on-the-spot witnesses. In any case they kept the crashed-saucer
incident very much alive for years. By 1954, therefore, seven years after the
reputed occurrence, they attracted the attention of someone in what may be
termed a position of "supreme power." He assuredly had enough power, in any
case, to do something about it. This person was Dwight Eisenhower, President of
the United States.
7 The President and the Captured Saucer
Doubtlessly because of his military background, General Eisenhower was
probably more aware of the importance of chance intelligence than other
Presidents of this era (who, although having had military experience, were not
military careerists), more interested in intelligence of a military potential, and
certainly better able to evaluate it. During his first term as President, Eisenhower
began to make inquiries into the reality of the "Roswell saucer capture."

One of his first problems, as outlined by a former high-level CIA operative who
shall remain nameless, was his startling (one might even say frightening)
discovery that even though he was President, as well as a former general of the
Army, he did not possess the necessary clearances to be permitted access to such
information. The intelligence agencies of the time were then enjoying a period of
action untrammeled by the supervision or excessive curiosity of other agencies
and certain classified and sensitive information might be secured for a time from
even the President. According to an understandably anonymous source: "Some
of the higher-ups in the intelligence community didn't trust Ike and were hesitant
to deal with him. These people frequently went off on their own tangents at that
point in time and either conveniently forgot to seek directives from the White
House, or ignored them when they did come."

Eisenhower, however, eventually learned of the rumors of the allegedly crashed

saucer and proceeded to take some action. Not surprisingly, according to sources
as close to the topic as we can get, he reportedly encountered a split within the
military establishment on this matter. We can imagine the reasoning among
opponents of declassification: it would be advisable to keep the saucer incident
silent-it is supremely important not just for scientific interest in extraterrestrials
but for national security. Any nation that could figure out how the discs operated
and could duplicate their maneuverability would have a missile defense and
delivery system inestimably in advance of the systems presently developed or
even logically contemplated and would therefore be in a position to control the
planet earth.

Taking this into consideration, the reticence of military authorities to admit the
actuality of the Roswell Incident and, in general, the automatic downgrading of
UFO sightings become more understandable. One favorite theory for censorship
has been: if the public were advised of a concrete proof of the real presence of
UFOs they would panic. But whether the public would panic or not is
UFOs they would panic. But whether the public would panic or not is
unpredictable. Perhaps a serious and cooperative interest on the part of the
public toward UFOs would be beneficial; certainly we would learn more about
them. On the other hand, if the UFOs represent a definite military advantage,
then they should be kept secret until their construction and operation could be
adapted to the advantage of one world power, preferably ours. This reasoning
may be why the superpowers employ strict censorship re UFOs while other
countries with efficient air forces and surface fleets frequently release official
reports concerning UFO encounters in the skies and at sea by their air and
surface craft patrols. These countries include, among others, Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New
Zealand, and, to an increasing degree, Canada.

Canada's connection with the UFO question has long been intensified by its
proximity to the U.S.A., an area of so much apparently "extraterrestrial activity,
and also by the increasingly reported presence of UFOs, which perhaps do not
recognize international boundaries, over its own immense territory. A memo
addressed to the Department of Transport, Ottawa, dated November 21, 1950,
from a W. B. Smith, indicates the Canadian interest in the U.S. Government's
preoccupation with UFOs that began shortly after the incident at Roswell.

Wilbert B. Smith, as senior radio engineer of the Department of Transport and

head of that department's Broadcast and Measurements Section, was evidently
designated to be one of the Canadian representatives to a 1950 National
Association of Radio Broadcasting (NARB) conference in Washington, D.C.
Smith was particularly interested in research concerning the possibility of
developing power sources utilizing the earth's own magnetic field.

Pertinent parts of this formerly "Top Secret" memo (downgraded to

"Confidential" September 15, 1969) follow:

Memorandum to the Comptroller of Telecommunications

...We believe that we are on the track of something which may well prove to be
the introduction to a new technology. The existence of a different technology is
borne out by the investigations which are being carried on at the present time in
relation to flying saucers...

While in Washington attending the NARB conference, two books were released:
one entitled Behind the Flying Saucers by Scully and the other The Flying
one entitled Behind the Flying Saucers by Scully and the other The Flying
Saucers Are Real by Don Keyhoe. Both books dealt mostly with the sightings of
UFOs and both claim that the flying objects were of extraterrestrial origin and
might well be space ships from other planets.

It appeared to me that our own work in geomagnetics might be aided by U.S.

intelligence information on UFOs.

I made discreet inquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff who were able to
obtain for me the following information.

(a) The matter is the most highly classified subject in the U.S. government,
rating higher even than the H-bomb. [Author's note: The H-bomb still had two
years to go, as it was first exploded in 1952.]

(b) Flying saucers exist.

(c) Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a
small group headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush.

(d) The entire matter is considered by the U.S. authorities to be of tremendous

significance.

Particularly relevant to this memo is a letter attached to it dated September 15,

1969, authorizing the downgrading of classification from "Top Secret" to
"Confidential," and stating that "at no time should [this information] be made
available to the public."

President Eisenhower, doubtlessly perplexed by the UFO furor in government

circles occurring in the United States at this time, would certainly, as a military
officer experienced in assessing intelligence reports, have had a particular
interest in determining the truth of the concrete presence of the legendary
captured saucer at Edwards Air Force Base. According to a series of reports,
including one rather detailed account, he had a chance to examine it firsthand at
Muroc on February 20, 1954.

He had gone to California in the middle of February for a golfing vacation

during which he was staying at the ranch of a friend, Paul Roy Helms. For
theorists who postulate that Ike's vacation in California was a cover for a secret
visit to Muroc, it is interesting to observe that the President had just come back
from a quail-shooting vacation in Georgia less than a week before. It can also be
noted that Muroc is not very far from Palm Springs, where the President was
noted that Muroc is not very far from Palm Springs, where the President was
staying, and a visit to Muroc would have been possible if he could have
disappeared from the press corps' constant scrutiny for even one day.

On February 20, Eisenhower apparently went somewhere on his own, without

his entourage, and, for the press corps at least, he had disappeared. Late in the
evening of the twentieth, wild rumors began to circulate among the press corps
to the effect that the President was not where he was supposed to be-that he had
either disappeared from the ranch, Smoke Tree, or something very serious had
happened to him.

With repeated phone calls to official sources at the ranch bringing only repeated
assurances that all was well, the reporters were left free to speculate. The tension
of an already shaky situation was heightened when several reporters succeeded
in wringing from confidential sources that the President really was missing, but
when word arrived that Press Secretary James Haggerty had been hastily
summoned to Smoke Tree from the midst of a steak cook-out to make a
statement, the pent-up speculation of the press corps ran amok.

Where, in fact, was the President? Nobody seemed to know for sure. Merriman
Smith of the United Press, jumping to the hasty conclusion that Eisenhower had
suffered a medical emergency of some sort, hit the press wire with a report that
the President had been taken from the ranch for "medical treatment." The
Associated Press did him one better by flashing on its New York wire the news
that Ike was dead, only to be forced to retract it moments later when Press
Secretary Haggerty appeared, definitely not in a good mood.

In the press room of the Mirador Hotel, amid a scene described by Time
magazine as a "demonstration of journalistic mob hysteria," Haggerty solemnly
announced that the uproar had in fact been caused by nothing more than the
President having "knocked a cap off a tooth" while chewing on a chicken leg,
and that he had been taken by his host, Paul Helms, to a local dentist, to have it
repaired.

The press corps accepted the story, hut the rumors persisted. Had Ike really gone
to a local dentist, or was the story a cleverly concocted cover for what had really
happened? At least one persistent (although generally discredited) rumor had it
that there were other reasons for Ike's disappearance that evening-and the reason
was somewhat "out of this world." According to this new rumor, the President's
tooth was all a cover story, and that in fact he had been taken, in strictest
secrecy, to nearby Edwards Air Force Base to view the remains of the crashed
secrecy, to nearby Edwards Air Force Base to view the remains of the crashed
disc(s) and the preserved bodies of the little men that had piloted it (them).

Meade Layne, then director of Borderland Sciences Research Associates (now

Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, see Chapter 5), had heard these
rumors too, but had paid little attention to them until about three months later
when, on April 16, 1954, he received a startling letter from one of his associates,
Gerald Light of Los Angeles. In this letter Light stated that he had spent some
forty-eight hours at Edwards Air Force Base in the company of three other men-
journalist Franklin Alien of the Hearst newspapers, financier Edwin Nourse of
the Brookings Institute, and Bishop (later Cardinal) James F. A. McIntyre of Los
Angeles-and had seen no fewer than "five separate and distinct types of aircraft
being studied" by military scientists and officials. Light said he was so shaken
by what he had seen that he qualified his reactions as giving him "the distinct
feeling that the world had come to an end with fantastic realism." No wonder!
The letter follows:

GERALD LIGHT
10545 Scenario Lane
Los Angeles, California
[Letter Received 4-16-54]

Mr. Meade Layne

San Diego, California

My dear Friend: I have just returned from Muroc. The report is true-
devastatingly true! I made the journey in company with Franklin Alien of the
Hearst papers and Edwin Nourse of Brookings Institute (Truman's erstwhile
financial adviser) and Bishop MacIntyre [sic} of L.A. (confidential names, for
the present, please.)

When we were allowed to enter the restricted section, (after about six hours in
which we were checked on every possible item, event, incident and aspect of our
personal and public lives) I had the distinct feeling that the world had come to an
end with fantastic realism. For I have never seen so many human beings in a
state of complete collapse and confusion as they realized that their own world
had indeed ended with such finality as to beggar description. The reality of
"otherplane" aeroforms is npw and forever removed from the realms of
speculation and made a rather painful part of the consciousness of every
responsible scientific and political group.
responsible scientific and political group.

During my two days visit I saw five separate and distinct types of aircraft being
studied and handled by our air-force officials-with the assistance and permission
of The Etherians! I have no words to express my reactions.

It has finally happened. It is now a matter of history.

President Eisenhower, as you may already know, was spirited over to Muroc one
night during his visit to Palm Springs recently. And it is my conviction that he
will ignore the terrific conflict between the various "authorities" and go directly
to the people via radio and television-if the impasse continues much longer.
From what I could gather, an official statement to the country is being prepared
for delivery about the middle of May.

I will leave it to your own excellent powers of deduction to construct a fating

picture of the mental and emotional pandemonium that is now shattering the
consciousness of hundreds of our scientific "authorities" and all the pundits of
the various specialized knowledges that make up our current physics. In some
instances I could not stifle a wave of pity that arose in my own being as I
watched the pathetic bewilderment of rather brilliant brains struggling to make
some sort of rational explanation which would enable them to retain their
familiar theories and concepts. And I thanked my own destiny for having long
ago pushed me into the metaphysical woods and compelled me to find my way
out. To watch strong minds cringe before totally irreconcilable aspects of
"science" is not a pleasant thing. I had forgotten how commonplace such things
as the dematerialization of "solid" objects had become to my own mind. The
coming and going of an etheric, or spirit, body has been so familiar to me these
many years I had just forgotten that such a manifestation could snap the mental
balance of a man not so conditioned. I shall never forget those forty-eight hours
at Muroc!

G.L.

Assuming that this letter is not a hoax, there are several key points which seem
to emerge as one examines it-not the least of which is the question of who this
Gerald Light might be and what he was doing at Edwards with the three
reasonably well-known figures he names. Unfortunately almost nothing is
known about Light himself aside from the fact that Meade Layne, recipient of
the letter, described him once in an early BSRF publication as a "gifted and
highly educated... writer and lecturer" who liked to dabble in clairvoyance and
highly educated... writer and lecturer" who liked to dabble in clairvoyance and
the occult. Additional research has turned up the fact that there was a Gerald
Light employed in the early 1950s as director of advertising and sales promotion
of CBS Columbia-the manufacturing division of the Columbia Broadcasting
System. But whether this was the same man remains unclear. Reilly Crabb,
current director of BSRF, could provide no further information except to say that
he had heard that Light had died some years ago. As for the other three men
named, Crabb told me he knew of several attempts which had been made over
the years to contact these people about Gerald Light's story, but that none of
them would discuss the matter or even acknowledge receipt of letters concerning
it. Since Alien, Nourse, and Cardinal Mclntyre are now dead, the mystery may
never be solved.

The most interesting thing about Light's letter, however, is his assertion that
"President Elsenhower... was spirited over to Muroc one night during his visit to
Palm Springs recently"-an assertion at variance with Press Secretary Haggerty's
"chicken bone" explanation for Ike's disappearance on the night of February 20.

If, indeed, Eisenhower had only been taken to the dentist, then why the long
official silence on the matter and the repeated statements from Smoke Tree that
all was well? If the dentist story were true, it would certainly have been a case
where the truth could have been told and the wild rumors circulating about Ike's
disappearance quelled at once without having done any harm in the process. The
attempted "all is well" cover-up at first and then the calling of Haggerty himself
to deal with what must have appeared as a mounting crisis with the press seems
excessive for the simple explanation that followed. Admittedly the evidence is
circumstantial at best, but it is nonetheless interesting.

One certain thing about Light's letter is the fact that his conviction about
Eisenhower being prepared to "go directly to the people... about the middle of
May" definitely never came to pass. If Ike was preparing an official statement on
the matter, he must have been persuaded not to deliver it by those same
"authorities" that had been advocates of strict secrecy from the very beginning.
Apparently Ike was let in on the secret as one of the first of a small but carefully
selected group of scientific, military, and civilian personnel from all walks of life
(Light, Alien, Nourse, and Mclntyre must also have been selected as part of this
group) who were shown the evidence over a period of time-possibly for the
purpose of gauging from their observed reactions what the effect on the general
public would likely be if such a story were released. If such is the case, the
mental confusion and near pandemonium that appear to have resulted and that
Light describes in his letter must have provided enough ammunition to result in
Light describes in his letter must have provided enough ammunition to result in
a total victory for the forces of secrecy. The witnesses who had seen the
evidence were silenced on their oaths and the project to release the news to the
public was resultantly scrapped. (Eisenhower, it is said, ordered silence and
further study.) The fact that Gerald Light apparently broke his oath by writing to
Meade Layne probably left them unperturbed once it was discovered that Layne
was not important enough to make the story stick even if he did publish it.

Another interesting piece of information on the presence of saucer-crash

wreckage at Edwards comes from the late British saucer researcher and writer
Desmond Leslie, who reportedly did some investigating in the Muroc vicinity
while on a visit to Los Angeles during the summer of 1954. Leslie told writer
George Hunt Williamson in an interview for Valor magazine on October 9,
1954, that "discreet inquiries" had convinced him that the "rumored saucer at
Muroc was actually there" and that it was being kept under guard "in hangar 27."
According to Leslie, "President Eisenhower had a 'look-see' at the craft during
his Palm Springs vacation." He would identify his source of information only as
"an Air Force man" who had actually "seen the craft," and who had told him that
"on a certain day... suddenly men coming back from leave were not allowed to
go back on the base and were given orders to 'get lost.'" Others, said his
informant, had such personal belongings as they needed brought to them as they
waited at the gate. Men who were stationed at the base that day were not allowed
to leave under any circumstances.

Unfortunately, Leslie had previously compromised his reliability through an

association with the late George Adamski, reputed saucer contactee of the 1950s
and an individual long associated with the so-called lunatic fringe of UFOlogy.
Even though Leslie's story may well have been true, few at the time were willing
to believe it.

Two other bits of research, however, have since come to light which seem to
indicate that there may be some truth here after all. The first deals with the
dentist who was supposed to have treated Ike for his broken tooth. Although the
dentist is now dead, Moore succeeded in contacting a member of his family in
June 1979 and found her strangely reluctant to talk about the incident. While she
said she did recall the dentist's being called upon to treat the President, she was
curiously unable to remember what time of day it was, what the circumstances
were surrounding the event, what the President's problem was, or even how
many times he saw the dentist ("I can't recall how many times-maybe twice,
maybe more. I don't remember.") She did recall, however, attending "a
maybe more. I don't remember.") She did recall, however, attending "a
presidential steak-fry" the next evening where he was loudly introduced to
reporters as "the dentist who had treated the President."

It would seem that a family member of anyone, doctor or dentist, called out in
midevening to treat the President of the United States for an "emergency" would
more vividly recall the details of the incident, even after twenty-five years.

In summary, the very fact that she "cannot recall" details which most people
under similar circumstances would easily remember seems strongly to suggest
that the extent of the dentist's involvement was only to act as a convenient
(howbeit willing) accessory to the cover story worked up by Press Secretary
Haggerty to placate the press corps. While the family may have viewed the
entire matter as a part of their patriotic duty at the time, it seems natural that
now, twenty-five years after the fact, a family member is unable to recall the
details of what she was told to tell reporters at the time. Her embarrassment at
this could easily explain her reluctance to have her name connected with it.

Another relevant bit comes from Mrs. Frank Scully, widow of the author of
Behind the Flying Saucer (Chapter 3), who recalled that in 1954 she and her
husband had bought a cabin in the desert mountains above Edwards Air Force
Base. According to Mrs. Scully, one of the carpenters who came to work for
them in about June of that year had previously worked as a civilian employee at
Edwards. This man, whose name she was unable to recall, had told them that
Eisenhower had indeed visited the base in secrecy some months before, and that
it was strange the press had never learned about it.

Perhaps some members of the press did learn about it, but were unable to
confirm it and so kept silent. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who at the time had
just recently (September 1953) stepped down as head of the Air Force's UFO
Project Blue Book, had also heard the rumors it seems, and was interested
enough in them to take the trouble to compose a typewritten memo on the topic.
Although this memo, which was discovered by Moore during an examination of
the Ruppelt files many years after his death, unfortunately gives no indication as
to whether Ruppelt believed the story or not, its very presence allows us to infer
that Ruppelt must have had more than just a passing interest in the topic.

More recently, a former high-level member in one of the departments under

Eisenhower, now living in Arizona, has confirmed privately to friends that Ike
did indeed visit Muroc in 1954 to see the remains of thecrashed disc and the
bodies, and that the trip had been made from Palm Springs by helicopter.
bodies, and that the trip had been made from Palm Springs by helicopter.

What happened to the disc after Eisenhower's visit? All we have to go on is

rumor and circumstance; but some of these imply that in late 1954 (due perhaps
to the publicity mentioned above) the disc was partially dismantled and shipped
by low-boy truck to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, to join
the bits of wreckage and bodies which had preceded them there in the late 1940s.

But prior to General Eisenhower's visit certain unusual happenings had been
noted in the skies over the area of Muroc. A number of UFO sightings in the
area before the objects and bodies were reportedly moved include the following:

July 8, 1947: Four separate sightings of unidentified disc-shaped objects were

observed over Muroc Air Force Base and Rogers Dry Lake secret testing site in
California. One object passed over above an F-51 aircraft at a time when no
known aircraft was in the vicinity.

August 31, 1948: Large unknown object trailing blue flame exhaust nearly one
mile long was reported cruising at 50,000 feet above U.S. Air Force Base at
Muroc. Civilian pilot Bob Hanley and two passengers reported seeing the same
or similar object over Mint Canyon at 12:15 A.M.

June 24, 1950: Navy transport pilot and crew and several airline pilots watched
cigar-shaped object maneuvering above Mojave Desert near Daggett, California,
about twenty-five miles east of Muroc Air Force Base. Object paced United
Airlines commercial flight for nearly twenty miles.

August 10, 1950: Naval physicist Lieutenant Robert C. Wykoff observed large
disc-shaped object through Navy 7 x 50 calibrated binoculars as it maneuvered
between himself and a distant range of hills. Sighting occurred along U.S. Route
395 near Edwards, about ten miles north of the junction of old U.S. Route 466.

September 30, 1952: Dick Beemer, aviation photographer, and two other
witnesses observed a pair of flattened, spherical-shaped objects hovering,
maneuvering, and performing sharp turns over Edwards Air Force Base.

In this connection it may be pertinent to note that Nicholas von Poppen, the
photographer who said that he took photographs of the crashed UFO (and saw
some dead crew members) at "Los Alamos," noted that at the time of his visit the
base was in a state of alert as a precautionary measure should other UFOs
suddenly appear on a rescue or retrieval mission. Besides a desire to obtain
suddenly appear on a rescue or retrieval mission. Besides a desire to obtain
information on the part of UFO investigators and perhaps President Eisenhower,
there may have existed (and may still exist) a certain interest from intelligences
from beyond this planet.

A prevalent rumor in UFO circles about the Roswell Incident revolves around
another leading figure in the United States Government, Senator Barry
Goldwater of Arizona. This rumor concerns an alleged attempt on the part of
Senator Goldwater (who holds the rank of general in the United States Air
Force) to visit a high-security area at Wright-Patterson Air Base, where,
according to rumor the Roswell

UFO as well as the bodies of the dead extraterrestrial crew were then kept, and
being refused admittance on a "need to know" basis.

According to Senator Goldwater, what actually happened was the following:

while en route to California in the early 1960s, the senator stopped at Wright-
Patterson Air Base, where he visited his friend General Curtis LeMay. Senator
Goldwater had heard of the existence of a room or section on the base referred to
as "Blue Room," where UFO artifacts, photographs, and exhibits were kept. The
senator, who, as a longtime pilot, had more than a passing interest in UFOs,
requested permission from General LeMay to visit the Blue Room exhibits.
General LeMay's response was eminently succinct: "Hell, no. I can't go, you
can't go, and don't ever ask me again!"

Although unable to view what to most researchers would have been conclusive
proof of the existence of extraterrestrial flying objects, Senator Goldwater's
reflections on the possibility of extraterrestrial life and probable technological
development have been expressed by him in what might be termed a guideline
for cosmic speculation: "I cannot believe that we are the only planet where there
are sentient beings... I have every reason to believe that other beings from other
parts of the universe are as smart or smarter than we are..."

Perhaps the Blue Room contained an answer. But whatever was inside was
evidently regarded as so secret that it could not be visited even by top air force
generals.
8 “Top Secret” Forever - the AVRO Alternative
If the United States Government actually did manage to pick up enough pieces
of the Roswell object roughly to determine what it was and something of how it
operated, it would therefore be understandable that it would be treated as "Top
Secret" during the life of existing security regulations. This would seem to be
especially necessary since an increasing number of foreign nations would wish
to obtain what could perhaps be the ultimate secret weapon. Then again, perhaps
other UFOs had already crashed or might crash in other parts of the world and
other nations would be in possession of other parts of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle
whose successful solution would give the nation in question the secret of flight
at incredible velocity and without the use of fuels as we presently conceive them.

The results of recovery operations would therefore have to be studied under

conditions of strict security and actually to fly such devices. These attempts, in
turn, have subsequently generated their own crop of rumors. One fairly prevalent
rumor of such an experiment has been reported by Reilly Crabb, president of the
Borderland Science Research Foundation of Vista, California.

Crabb learned about the alleged incident from an air force sergeant in 1971 who
told Crabb that it happened four years previously while he was on temporary
duty at Edwards Air Force Base. During his time there the sergeant had become
friendly with a certain fighter pilot whom he refused to name but whom he
described as being the "Steve Canyon" type. In a conversation with "Canyon"
one day within one of the hangars they discussed the topic of UFOs and the
sergeant expressed his interest and belief in the phenomenon. The officer
listened for a few moments, hesitated, and suddenly said: "I want to show you
something. Just follow me and don't ask questions. I won't answer them
anyway."

The sergeant was led to another hangar "where security precautions were not so
stringent but that his uniform and ID card got him into the side office and shop
area." The two proceeded to an upper level where there were offices with side
windows overlooking the hangar floor below-all of which were heavily
curtained. On the floor ahead was a red line beyond which a guard would let no
one pass without proper authorization. The pilot whispered to the sergeant to
wait for him there and, while waiting, to catch a look through a slightly parted
curtain behind him at what was on the hangar deck directly below.
The pilot went on through security and, since the guard seemed unconcerned, the
sergeant took what he described to Crabb as a "good look." What he saw was a
"saucer-shaped craft sitting on high landing gear. It was completely circular with
sharp edges sloping up to a domed cockpit area in the center. It looked as if it
were capable of carrying at least two, perhaps three, persons, and [was] probably
twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter overall." There were service personnel
dressed in the usual air-force-blue coveralls moving around the craft as it sat
there.

The pilot soon returned and the sergeant followed him out of the area. Just
before they parted, the pilot reminded him to say nothing about what he had seen
or where he had been, and that if he did, he (the pilot) would deny it all. "Do you
think that was a flying saucer built and operated by U.S. Air Force personnel?"
asked Crabb.

"I do," replied the sergeant. "In fact, I became acquainted with civilian guards
there at Edwards who claimed to have Seen these disc-shaped craft operating
from specially camouflaged hangars at night."

Reilly Crabb's informant transferred to Vietnam shortly after their conversation

where, Crabb believes, he met his death in action.

In seeming confirmation of the likelihood that at least some governmental

research has been carried out on a saucer-like disc-shaped craft is a persistent
rumor that such an object was indeed test-flown over Nellis AFB in Nevada
during 1965, stored for a period of time, and then test-flown again, presumably
with some additional modifications, in 1974. Some informants claim to have
seen such a plane, referred to as the "Flying Flapjack," in a commercial
newsreel. When one such witness wrote the TV program Той Asked For It and
requested a rerun of the newsreel on TV, he was informed that the newsreel had
been acquired by the government and was henceforth "Top Secret." The Flying
Flapjack has been a dead project (officially) since the 1940s, and, presumably,
the only aircraft of this type ever built never left Connecticut.

When asked by letter about such a rumor, the Air Force invariably refers the
inquirer to the nonclassified and highly visible work done by the Air Force
between 1954 and 1959 in contract with the A. V. Roe Ltd. aeronautics firm of
Toronto. Some $10 million was spent to develop the so-called AV-9 AVRO car
disc-shaped aircraft-a monumental flop which never got more than a few feet off
the ground and wobbled like a Yo-Yo when it finally was test-flown in
the ground and wobbled like a Yo-Yo when it finally was test-flown in
December 1959. This technological disaster, according to the Air Force, is as far
as anyone has ever progressed in trying to force the saucer shape to conform to
the principles of aerodynamics. The case would seem to be closed.

Or is it? For recently some of those connected with the AVRO project have
suggested otherwise-have suggested that the ill-fated AVRO car was really
nothing more than a monumental blind designed to divert public attention from
the real research going on with actual "captured" hardware or attempts at
duplicating it. Lieutenant Colonel George Edwards, USAF (Ret.) of New York,
a scientist who lays claim to actually having been involved in the AVRO VZ-9
man-made saucer project, had gone on record (Ideal's UFO Magazine, No. 4,
Fall, 1978) as saying that he and others involved with the project knew from the
beginning that it would never succeed and that the VZ-9 would never fly.
"Although we weren't cut in on it," he is quoted as saying, "we know that the AF
was secretly test-flying a real alien spacecraft. The VZ-9 was to be a 'cover,' so
the Pentagon would have an explanation whenever people reported seeing a
saucer in flight." If the above were true (and the VZ-9 was certainly itself a fact)
this could be classified as one more example of "gray" propaganda as described
on page 50.

The mystery of the crashed disc or UFO near Roswell at the very beginning of
the "UFO age" will probably be revealed only when governmental authorities
release the mountains of UFO information they have been collecting through the
years. The quest for information by interested civilians is complicated not only
because pertinent agencies have been unwilling to release information but also
because UFO reports are not concentrated in any one agency. They are variously
held by the CIA, the FBI, NASA, the Air Force, the Navy, the National Security
Agency, and the National Archives, among others, and, as could be expected,
reports have been lost or misfiled while on loan to another agency.

UFO groups have been agitating and lobbying to this effect since the 1960s but
now, because of the passage of the amended Freedom of Information Act
(5USC-552), which took effect appropriately on July 4, 1974, the logjam of
withheld information seems to be giving some signs of breaking up.

The Freedom of Information Act detente was accompanied by optimistic

portents. Carter, in his presidential campaign, stated that he had personally seen
a UFO in Georgia while he was governor and that he would release government-
held UFO information if elected President, providing the release of such
information did not compromise the nation's security interests [2] In April 1977,
U.S. News & World Report prophesied: before the year is out the government-
perhaps the Presidentis expected to make what are described as "unsettling
disclosures" about unidentified flying objects. Such revelations, based on
information from the CIA, would be a reversal of official policy that in the past
has downgraded UFO incidents.

As it became increasingly evident that no revelations were forthcoming from

government agencies it was perhaps just a matter of time before some UFO
study groups reacted under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

In September 1977, William Spaulding, director of Ground Saucer Watch, Inc.

(GSW), of Phoenix, Arizona, started the ball rolling by filing a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit against the CIA, alleging that the agency not only
possessed thousands of documents about its involvement with UFO activity over
the years but that it had actively conspired and was still conspiring to keep these
documents secret from the public by actually denying their very existence.

GSW filed its suit as a result of refusal by the CIA to provide access to its UFO-
related files on the grounds that national security was involved. GSW's strategy
was to demand an "in camera" inspection (a private but official inspection
carried out by a federal judge within the confines of his chambers) of documents
to determine to what degree, if any, the nation's security was involved-a process
provided for by the FOIA itself.

Then a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), was formed early
in 1978 under the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW
and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency. CAUS's
announced aim was nothing less than an "attempt to establish that the USAF (or
elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft" in the Texas-
New Mexico-Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s.

In December 1977, under the leadership of Brad Sparks, CAUS's technical

consultant and director of research, the CAUS group completely assumed
management of the pending GSW suit, and through discovery procedure and
actual at-the-table negotiations succeeded in obtaining a court order from the
U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., which supposedly forced the CIA to do
a file search for all its components for material relating to UFOs. Interestingly,
some 10,000 pages of pertinent documents were reportedly "located" in July
1978, less than 900 pages of which were finally released to GSW/CAUS in
1978, less than 900 pages of which were finally released to GSW/CAUS in
December of that year. At the same time, the CIA refused to release some fifty-
seven UFO-related documents (actual number of pages unknown) on the basis of
national security regulations.

A similar request to the FBI by optical physicist Bruce Maccabee of Silver

Spring, Maryland, eventually forced the FBI to produce nearly 1,000 pages of
their UFO-related files, even after an initial denial that any such files existed.

Although most of the documents released thus far are copies of routine
memoranda and the like which have produced little in the way of new or
unexpected information, there are several which seem to have very strong
implications with respect to the Roswell Incident. One of the most startling of
these is a memo annotated by none other than the late J. Edgar Hoover, chief of
the FBI, longtime powerful figure in government, and a person who was notably
jealous both of his prerogatives and suspected infringements on his power. The
memo was brief and to the point:

Memorandum for Mr. Ladd

Mr. [censored] also discussed this matter with Colonel L. R. Forney of MID
[Military Intelligence Division]. Colonel Forney indicated that it was his attitude
that inasmuch as it has been established that the flying discs are not the result of
any Army or Navy experiments, the matter is of interest to the FBI. He stated
that he was of the opinion that the Bureau, if at all possible, should accede to
General Schulgen's request [i.e., to aid the Army Air Force in its investigations].

SWR: AJB [Initials]

Added to the bottom of the memo, in Hoover's own handwriting, is:

I would do it but before agreeing to it we must insist upon full access to discs
recovered. For instance in the [illegible: could be either "SW" or LA"] case the
Army grabbed it and would not Jet us have it for cursory examination. H.

One supposes that whatever further action was taken on this rather petulant
demand is somewhere among the documents still (if ever) to be released. The
fact that the memo is dated "July 15, 1947" is, however, highly significant, as is
the uncertain reference to location which could be either "SW" (for Southwest)
or "LA" (for Louisiana or perhaps even Los Angeles - the area in which Edwards
Air Force Base is located).
Air Force Base is located).

The Louisiana possibility, which has been suggested by some researchers in

reference to a saucer hoax involving a sixteen-inch aluminum disc and some
radio parts that took place in Shreveport on July 7, 1947, is almost totally ruled
out by two FBI memos dealing with that case, one of which originates from the
FBI Field Office in New Orleans and the other of which is from Hoover himself
(both dated July 7). While Hoover's annotation above clearly indicates that he
was referring to a crashed disc that "the Army grabbed... and would not let [the
FBI] have" for examination, the two Louisiana memos referring to the
Shreveport case plainly show that just the opposite was true and that the Army
Air Force did indeed cooperate with the FBI on this case.

The evidence that Hoover was in fact referring to the New Mexico crash
becomes even stronger in light of another FBI memo which was brought to the
attention of the authors by researcher Brad Sparks. This one, a copy of an
"Urgent" July 8, 1947, teletype communication between the FBI's Dallas Field
Office and the Cincinnati Field Office, with copies to Hoover and the Strategic
Air Command, refers directly to the Roswell Incident. Pertinent sections of this
memo are as follows:

TELETYPE
FBI DALLAS
7-8-47
6-17 PM
DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI
URGENT FLYING DISC, INFORMATION CONCERNING. [Censored],
HEADQUARTERS EIGHTH AIR FORCE, TELEPHONICALLY ADVISED
THIS OFFICE THAT AN OBJECT PURPORTING TO BE A FLYING DISC
WAS RE COVERED [sic] NEAR ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, THIS DATE...
(Censored) 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 BORNE OUT THIS BELIEF. DISC
AND BALLOON BEING TRANSPORTED TO WRIGHT FIELD BY SPECIAL
PLANE FOR EXAMINATION. [Italics added] INFORMATION PROVIDED
THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL INTEREST IN CASE AND FACT
THAT NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY? ASSOCIATED PRESS
AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF LOCATION OF
DISC TODAY. (Censored) ADVISED WOULD REQUEST WRIGHT FIELD
TO ADVISE CINCINNATI OFFICE RESULTS OF EXAMINATION....
WYLY
END

Upon analysis of this all-important piece of communication, several points

become immediately apparent:

(1) At no point was the FBI given access to the disc or wreckage recovered,
exactly as indicated by Hoover's July 15 memo.

(2) Someone at Ramey's office at Fort Worth, probably Ramey himself, had
conferred by telephone directly with Wright Field concerning the exact nature
and description of the strange object that had fallen into their hands. The result
of this conversation was the clear conclusion that whatever the object that had
exploded over the Brazel ranch was, it was definitely not a "high altitude
weather balloon with a radar reflector," in spite of the fact that certain elements
of it may have in some ways resembled such a device.

(3) General Ramey's statement that the special flight to Wright Field had been
canceled and that the debris was on the floor of his office and would probably
remain right there was, as both Major Marcel and Colonel DuBose have already
stated, a blatant and deliberate falsehood clearly designed by Ramey solely for
the purpose of getting the press off of his back.

(4) The Army Air Force's apparent motive in informing the FBI about the case at
all appears only to have been to ensure their assistance in quelling public
reaction should NBC and AP have proven successful in their attempts to break
the full extent of the story to the public.

If the AAF at Wright Field ever did advise the FBI of the results of their
investigations concerning the disc, then such results have never been made
public. The bureau's failure to obtain proper details about the Roswell Incident
did not, however, dissuade Hoover from his conviction that the best way to gain
as much information as possible about these mysterious discs was to cooperate
with the AAF rather than to try and work around them. Accordingly, on July 30,
1947, the following directive was issued to all agents:

7-30-47
BUREAU BULLETIN No. 42
Series 1947
You should investigate each instance which is brought to your attention of a
sighting of a flying disc in order to ascertain whether or not is. is [sic] a bona-
fide sighting, an imaginary one or a prank. You should also bear in mind that
individuals might report seeing flying discs for various reasons. It is conceivable
that an individual might be desirous of seeking personal publicity, causing
hysteria or playing a prank.

The Bureau should be notified immediately by teletype of all reported sightings

and the results of your inquiries. In instances where the report appears to have
merit, the teletype should be followed by a letter to the Bureau containing in
detail the results of your inquiries. The Army Air Forces have assured the
Bureau complete cooperation in these matters and in any instances where they
fail to make the information available to you or make the recovered discs
available for your examination, it should promptly be brought to the attention of
the Bureau.

Any information you develop in connection with these discs should be promptly
brought to the attention of the Army through your usual liason [sic] channels.

OFF. COPY FILED

AUG 4, 1947

Even though the above documents clearly indicate extensive FBI involvement in
the investigation of flying saucers, this involvement was later covered up and
denied by the bureau. In the authors' possession are copies of several letters from
the FBI dated between 1966 and 1972 and written in response to public inquiries
regarding the nature and extent of the FBI's involvement with the flying-disc
phenomenon. In each of these letters, all signed by J. Edgar Hoover, the stock
response is given: "For your information, the investigation of Unidentified
Flying Objects is not and never has been a matter that is within the investigative
jurisdiction of the FBI."

Still another unexpected find turned up among the reports released. This was a
memo, dated 23 September 1947, from General Nathan Twining of the Air Force
and was sent by him as commander of the AAF Air Materiel Command, directed
to the Air Technical Intelligence Command at Dayton, Ohio, which had
apparently requested his office for guidance about "flying discs." An excerpt
from this memo follows:
23 September 1947
Subject: AMC Opinion Concerning "Flying Discs"
TO: Commanding General
Army Air Forces
Washington 25, D.C.
ATTENTION: Brig. General George Schulgen
AC/AS-2

1. As requested by AC/AS-2 there is presented below the considered opinion of

this Command concerning the so-called "Flying Discs." This opinion is based on
interrogation report data furnished by AC/AS-2 and preliminary studies by
personnel of T-2 and Aircraft Laboratory, Engineering Division T-3. This
opinion was arrived at in a conference between personnel from the Air Institute
of Technology, Intelligence T-2, Office Chief of Engineering Division, and the
Aircraft, Power Plant and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3.

2. It is the opinion that:

a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious.

b. There are objects probably approximately the shape of a disc, of such

appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft.

c. There is a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused by natural

phenomenon, such as meteors.

d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb,

manueverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered
evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to
the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually,
automatically or remotely.

e. The apparent common description of the objects is as follows:

(1) Metallic or light reflecting surface.

(2) Absence of trail, except in a few instances when the object apparently was
operating under high performance conditions.
(3) Circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top.

(4) Several reports of well kept formation flights varying from three to nine
objects.

(5) Normally no associated sound, except in three instances a substantial

rumbling roar was noted...

It is understandable that the Twining memo makes no reference to the Roswell

disc, but the date of the document, barely two and a half months after the
incident, and the fact that the memo accepts the reality of "flying discs" are
indicative of the official climate of urgency generated by the Roswell Incident.

On the question raised in the CAUS action re specific date relating to the matter
of a UFO crash and recovery operation (or operations), however, the CIA
responded in August that "such data would fall under Air Force purview and
such data would have to be obtained from the USAF."

Anticipating just such a response, CAUS had already filed a FOIA request with
the Air Force the month before specifically requesting crashed-saucer records for
1947-48 and listing as participants in the incident a retired USAF colonel who
reportedly "was in charge of securing the area during the recovery operation"
and a retirefcl lieutenant colonel who had been airborne at the time of the alleged
crash and had been alerted to the object's intrusion into U.S. air space by radio
reports over his aircraft's scramble frequency.

The Air Force confirmed that the first individual, identified only as "Colonel
John Bowen," had indeed been serving as provost marshal at Carswell Air Force
Base, Fort Worth at the time of the alleged incident, but would provide no
additional information. In August, арго forma denial was issued in which the Air
Force characteristically denied the existence of documents or records relating to
the crash and recovery of any extraterrestrial device.

Later, responding to a subsequent appeal of this denial filed under the provisions
of the FOIA, the Air Force maintained that it was not subject to receive such an
appeal since it had not denied access to documents but rather had denied the very
existence of such material. The FOIA, it said, contemplated only cases involving
the denial of access to records, not cases where the specific existence of records
is denied.

And there the matter temporarily rests. As of the time of this writing, a
And there the matter temporarily rests. As of the time of this writing, a
prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm, anticipating a long struggle, has agreed
to handle the CAUS vs. Air Force crashed-UFO suit at a reduced fee rate as a
"public interest action," while at the same time the GSW/CIA case is proceeding
through the courts in the hands of a New York law firm. Peter Gersten, the
attorney in charge of the case, is not overly sanguine about the material the
action has so far produced: "We suspect that the agency is withholding at least
two hundred more documents than the fifty-seven they have admitted they are
keeping from us to protect intelligence sources." He plans, nevertheless, to
pursue the suit from agency to agency until the missing reports (including those
of the Roswell Incident) are obtained.

But on the surface, at least, the climate of official cooperation has undergone a
recent temperate change. Requests for information about UFOs are now being
met or at least acknowledged with considerable alacrity. Exceptions must be
made, of course, for the important cases of which the happening at Roswell may
be classified as a key and, in a way, as a preview of the future.

Consider the implications of the Roswell Incident: If only one of the many
individuals mentioned in this book who claim to have witnessed the crash and/or
subsequent recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle is telling the truth-then perhaps
at this very moment we sit at the verge of the greatest news story of the twentieth
century, the first contact with live (or dead) extraterrestrials. This occurrence, if
true, would be at least comparable to Columbus's encounter with the startled
natives on his visit to the New World. Except for one thing. In this case we
would be the startled natives.
9 The Russian Connection
From the dusty newspaper files of other decades we learn of a tremendous and
unexplained explosion of a meteor or comet which crashed into the earth from
the skies over Siberia in 1908; from the high Andean plateau of South America
reports come to us of a recent fireball that sheared off the top of a mountain in
1979; in 1978 tremendous unidentified booms were heard from over the Atlantic
Ocean off the coasts of New Jersey and Virginia; shattering booms or explosions
were also referred to in news reports of the nineteenth century. The NASA,
AEC, FAC, NOAA, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy, and other concerned
agencies have all given explanations of what the booms were not but failed to
establish in each case what they were. Nor have explanations for the following
phenomena been satisfactorily established: The Siberian, or Tunguska, fireball,
exploding spaceship, atomic blast, or whatever it was left no trace of
extraterrestrial or meteor core. There remained only a flattened or burned part of
the forest (but no crater), a considerable number of dead reindeer, local legends
of a great explosion, and residual radiation which lasted through the years.

Proof of the Andean incident, reputedly in Bolivia, is still as tenuous as the

mountain air, while the mighty booms of 1978 off the Atlantic Coast may have
come from space or from the earth itself. And, besides the above suppositions of
possible crashes and explosions from space there exist other rumors usually
dealing with downed UFOs in the United States which may, of course, be
variants of the original Roswell Incident improved and relocated with retelling.
Apparently nothing further has surfaced in the intervening years which has left a
more concrete trace of extraterrestrial visitors than certain burned sections of
woodland and the unexplained searing of the desert floor.

In the past several years, however, rumors and a certain amount of semiofficial
documentation have been surfacing in regard to another "visitor from space."
This one left some concrete proof of its encounter with earth, during which the
UFO apparently suffered an explosion and subsequently struck the earth before
it recovered and was able to resume its path in the sky. There exist certain
similarities between this Russian occurrence, which allegedly took place near
Lake Onega in the Karelean Associated Soviet Socialist Republic, U.S.S.R., and
the Roswell Incident.

The Lake Onega incident took place in 1961 but only recently have references to
it appeared in the West. It is described in UFOs in the U.S.S.R., Vol. II (1975)
by Professor Felix Ziegel and in The New Soviet Psychic Discoveries by Gris
and Dick (Prentice Hall, 1978). Original reports [3] at the time of the incident
were made by Professor Ziegel, of the Soviet Aviation Institute, and Yuri Fomin,
a Soviet state engineer. It is noteworthy that before official reports began to be
circulated in the Soviet Union considerable comment on this occurrence had
appeared in illegal samisdat, or underground, publications, just as if reports of
nonofficial UFO publications in the United States had later been officially
credited by the government. The latter has not yet happened.

The incident occurred near the now-abandoned village of Entino on the far
northern shores of Lake Onega. In the early morning of April 27, 1961, a group
of twenty-five hunters and woodsmen saw an "aerial object of unknown origin"
approach the ground and then collide with it on an inlet bay. (According to
witnesses, this happened at 8 or 10 A.M. Reported time variation might have
been due to several reasons, such as confusion between Moscow and local time,
often a problem in the Soviet Union, the probability that the hunters were not
wearing watches, and the understandable nervousness of Soviet citizens faced
with explosions coming from the sky. But the descriptions of the witnesses
agreed exactly as to what they had seen.)

The object was oval-shaped, as big as a large passenger plane, and glowed with a
blue-green light. It was traveling at a low altitude and at tremendous speed. It
was on an east-to-west course when it struck the ground near the northern
shoreline of the lake, making a sound like a large explosion and causing
considerable damage to the ground and surrounding vegetation.

The alarmed party of hunters contacted the forest ranger for the district, Valentin
Borsky, with an urgent request for assistance. Borsky arrived on the scene at
about eight the following morning.

Further investigation by Borsky revealed that other people in the area had
observed the same sequence of events as the hunters. According to witnesses, the
object had survived the impact with the earth and continued westward with a
slightly wobbling motion on a trajectory still very close to the ground. Then it
had disappeared. All witnesses reported no sound associated with the object
except for the noise of the impact itself.

Subsequent investigation of the impact site by Borsky and later by a combined

civilian-military team from the town of Povenets, with environmental scientist
civilian-military team from the town of Povenets, with environmental scientist
Fydor Denisov heading the civilian contingent and Soviet Army engineer Major
Anton Kopeikin in command of the military section with senior technician
Lieutenant Boris Lapunov, revealed that the object's collision with the lakeshore
had produced three trenches, one major and two lesser ones, with accompanying
uprooting of vegetation. The impact on the ice itself had smashed a large area of
lake ice, overturning several huge chunks of it and throwing a number of other
large and small pieces out into the ground. The ice appeared to have acquired an
intense green coloring from the impact. The trenches produced on the
escarpment along the shore consisted of a major trench some twenty-seven
meters long, fifteen meters wide, and with a maximum depth of three meters; a
second trench, starting at the far western end of the first and separated from it by
about five and a half meters, and a third less-defined trench some forty
centimeters in width and leading to the lake itself. The escarpment at this point
of the lake is inclined about sixty degrees to the surface of the lake. Beyond the
three trench-like marks mentioned and the impact damage sustained by the lake
ice, there appeared to be no other evidence of collision in the area.

A close examination of the trenches along the escarpment and the uprooted
ground on the shore of the lake was conducted by Major Kopeikin. This led to
the recovery of a number of tiny, black, metallic-looking, geometrically shaped
particles of apparently artificial origin, and one small piece of a thin, metallic-
looking foil-like (author's emphasis) substance, one millimeter thick, two
centimeters long, and a half centimeter wide, later found to be of the same
composition as the black particles. These, along with a number of samples of the
bright "chrome-green" colored ice and the black grains, were collected and
subsequently sent to the Leningrad Technological Institute for analysis.

The analysis produced the following results: A. The green ice, when melted, left
behind a residue of string-like fiber. This fiber, when analyzed, yielded an
unknown organic compound accompanied by the presence of small quantities of
aluminum, calcium, barium, silicon, sodium, and titanium.

B. The geometrically shaped metallic-appearing particles were found to be

resistant to acid and high temperatures, were not radioactive, and seemed to
consist of a silicon-iron alloy in combination with lesser amounts of aluminum,
lithium, titanium, and sodium.

C. The foil-like substance appeared to be of the same composition as the larger

particles. The noted Soviet geophysicist Professor Vladimir Sharanov of the
Leningrad Technological Institute became so interested in the incident that he
Leningrad Technological Institute became so interested in the incident that he
made arrangements to visit the isolated site himself. Basing his conclusions on
the above analysis as well as on the evidence at the collision site, Professor
Sharanov expressed his opinion as follows:

“I do not believe that the object was a meteorite. The destruction and disturbance
to the ground caused by falling meteorites was absent in this case. Specifically, a
falling meteorite leaves a crater two to five times its size. In this case no craters
could be found. The descent of a meteorite is accompanied by clearly
identifiable audible and visual effects. There were none in this case.

Finally, the chemical substance left by meteorites in the ground was not present
in this case. The grains found on the lake bottom, while unex-plainable at the
present time, were clearly of artificial origin”.

The possibility that the object may have been a regular aircraft or even an
American spy plane (a normal reaction in the U.S.S.R.), reconnoitering at a very
low altitude in order to escape radar detection, was totally ruled out by Sharanov
and by scientists at the Leningrad Institute. They concluded that no known
aircraft could possibly have withstood such a heavy impact against frozen
ground without suffering severe structural damage and losing significant
numbers of its parts, which would have subsequently been located in the area.

Professor Felix Ziegel is a respected Soviet space scientist and astronomer and,
having written some twenty-eight books on astronomy and astronautics and
numerous scientific papers on these subjects, would seem to be eminently
capable of and understandably careful in establishing the difference between
aircraft, comets, and meteors. His own conclusions about the unidentified flying
object of Lake Onega, based on his personal investigation of the case, is of
considerable interest. He qualifies it as "a space probe, coming from another
planet [which had] scraped the ground but managed to continue despite
presumably superficial damage." He continues:

"It is the only such case on record within the territory of the U.S.S.R." Professor
Ziegel, in his above observations, was obviously referring only to "crash"
contacts and not the many sightings of UFOs over the U.S.S.R., including brief
encounters with fighter planes, sometimes with fatal results for the Soviet pilots.

Professor Aleksander Kazentsev, a noted Russian scientific investigator and

writer and a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, was somewhat more
direct: "It was obviously a space probe. If you tried to identify it as anything else
direct: "It was obviously a space probe. If you tried to identify it as anything else
you would find that all evidence points to the contrary. Obviously the files on
the Onega mystery are far from closed."

The Roswell and Lake Onega incidents seem to be coin-cidentally similar.

Consider the ingredients: An unknown object flying east to west at an extremely
low altitude and at very high speed; there occurs a collision or explosion,
producing damage to the ground, uprooting vegetation, and, in the Lake Onega
case, ice; metallic-like debris is scattered over the area; no sound is heard except
that of the collision, impact, or explosion; the object remains in the air, still
traveling west after its close encounter with the ground, although in the Roswell
Incident it crash-landed after the first malfunction.

But did the Lake Onega object sustain enough damage to cause it to crash to the
earth at some point farther to the west as the Roswell object seems to have done?
Given the extremely vast area and small concentration of population in the area
surrounding the Lake Onega impact site, such an event could easily have
occurred and the resultant wreckage could still be awaiting discovery by some
fur trapper, woodcutter, wandering tribesman, or possibly a member of a work
gang. It is also possible, since the population is so sparse, that the wreckage of
such an object (and possibly bodies of the crew) could have been detected and
recovered by Soviet military units without the civilization population becoming
aware of it, a situation certainly more likely in the U.S.S.R. than in the U.S.A.,
where the Roswell Incident got announced in the press and on the radio before
the news was circumvented by the authorities.

For decades the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. have suspected each other of being the
source of the unfathomable and persistent UFOs. A large segment of public
opinion in both superpowers is now more or less convinced that our mysterious
visitors really exist and that they come from somewhere else in space, or perhaps
in time. Now, as both powers are beginning to explore our nearest neighbor in
the cosmos, the moon, it would seem advisable that the two powers, and others
who eventually join the exploration of the moon, share information attained,
especially regarding the possibility of present or past life on the moon.

There are persistent rumors that U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have
observed and photographed what appear to be constructions on the surface of the
moon. These include walls, domes, bridge-like formations, spires and spire-like
pyramids estimated to be 150 feet high within the Sea of Storms, where Conrad
and Gordon also observed "something resembling a rectilinear wall." On the
dark side of the moon the Soviet Luna 9 reported geometric arrangements of
dark side of the moon the Soviet Luna 9 reported geometric arrangements of
huge stones, which, according to Professor Ivanov, a Soviet space scientist,
could be flight markers for a lunar runway. Within the Sea of Tranquility a
number of sharp shadows seem to be caused by precipitous towering structures,
one shadow described as indicating a tower-like formation "as high as the
Washington Monument." Still another resembling a gigantic antenna at the edge
of theJansen Crater is described as being of "improbable height" with the added
suggestion that it might be a gigantic electric pylon.

Such rumors or reports have been, of course, regularly denied or, when already
photographed, downgraded as perfectly natural formations. Astronomers and
photo interpreters, understandably careful of their reputations, have explained
the pyramids as shadows, the bridges and walls as curving ridges, the
arrangements of stones as chance scattering of boulders, and the domes as the
bubbling up of the moon's surface because of volcanic activity. (But if this were
truly the case the surface of the domes themselves would be the same color as
the surrounding moonscape and not, as they are, a translucent white.)

Further unexplained phenomena noted on the moon imply motion. One

photograph (reportedly from the Apollo 11 mission), published in the United
States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, shows two glowing
unidentified discs moving up from a moon crater. Sustained bursts of lights and
intermittent moon spots glowing in changing colors have long been observed on
different parts of the moon by a large selection of astronomers observing from
different parts of the earth and at different times. These have been especially
noted as coming from the Cobra's Head in Schroter Valley and in the Aristarchus
and Maskelyne craters. The observed phenomenon of a curious silicon-like mist
occasionally seen rising from the surface of the moon has been ascribed by one
observer, considering the absence of water vapor, to the possibility that "moon-
movers" were digging in one of the craters. These last mentioned phenomena, if
further verified, would doubtlessly be ascribed to the still slightly active interior
of the moon.

If we adopt, however, the logical supposition that we are not alone in our galaxy
it is not too much an additional step of the imagination to speculate on the
possibility of the use of the moon by unspecified others as a base from which to
observe our earth. The dark side of the moon presents several outstanding
advantages to this end. It is shielded from radio interference from earth, it has no
climactic difficulties or corrosion problems, and, as the largest moon in the solar
system relative to the size of its planet - almost a sister planet to the earth - it is
system relative to the size of its planet - almost a sister planet to the earth - it is
conveniently near the developed planetary life existing on earth.

Physicist Stanton Friedman has suggested that perhaps the relatively small UFOs
are "exploration modules" brought to the moon by larger craft from other points
in this or other galaxies.

The tens of thousands of UFOs that have been reported throughout the earth
began in 1947 shortly after the atom bomb ushered in the era which might be
labeled "the end of cosmic isolation" or "the end of innocence." The proximity of
intensive UFO sightings and past atomic bombings and continuing tests may
have provoked a more lively interest in atomic activity on earth on the part of
our neighbors (if we take it for granted that they exist) in outer or inner space
and intensified their observations and patrols, especially over the extensive land
areas where the great powers are busily preparing for atomic warfare.

It is logical to consider that since the great number of sightings seem to have
been noted over the U.S.A. and its adjoining oceans and, more recently, an
increasing number over the plains and forests of the U.S.S.R., there should have
been occasional malfunctions in the operations of UFOs over these two
extensive world areas. While there seem to have been at least two instances that
have left materials behind, there might have been still others that both sides are
keeping secret from each other and from their own people.

The danger of continued UFO secrecy, now being tested in the courts of the
United States, is fairly obvious. Individual UFO malfunction resulting in large
explosions or retaliatory attacks by UFOs could easily be attributed to potential
enemy action (since UFOs do not officially exist) and set off chain reactions
leading to the use of nuclear warheads among the increasing number of nations
possessing these weapons. The nations of the earth owe it to themselves and
each other to share information received on UFOs over the skies of earth as well
as evidence of unidentified nonearthly activities in space.

Werner von Braun, the noted father of rocketry who helped develop the V-[2]for
Germany in WW II and later the U.S. space shots, made a prophetic statement
before his death about the pervasive

but hard-to-establish quality of UFOs and their inference about extraterrestrial

life: "It is as impossible to confirm them in the present as it will be to deny them
in the future."
Let us hope that as our present becomes our uncertain future we will be ready to
accept them in understanding and goodwill and, at the same time, with the
necessary technical preparation, on earth as well as in space.

For this we need a common global space effort, a free exchange between
scientific and technological establishments throughout the world. It will be
necessary to share our knowledge and inventive techniques, to inform the public
of what is happening, and to contribute as much as possible to a safe progression
of our shared spaceship, Earth, through the dangers inherent in the cosmos. And
while we do not yet know whether UFOs represent a danger, it is nevertheless
self-evident, as the great powers of earth experiment with ever-longer-ranging
missiles and killer satellites, that humanity represents a danger to itself in space
as well as on the earth.

The increasingly obvious presence of UFOs over the continents and oceans of
earth give us cause to reflect on the use we may make of our great advances in
science developed in the last century and possibly now getting out of hand.

Many motives have been ascribed to the senders or occupants of UFOs, mostly
concerned with attack, exploitation, reconnaissance for conquest, capture of
human specimens, or planned future occupation of the earth, all of which mirror
our own images of how we would react in their place. But, possibly because of
the danger we represent to ourselves and our surroundings, there may be another
explanation. Perhaps what we call UFOs are part of a design - or message -
whose meaning may become clear to us, one hopes, while there is still time.
FOOTNOTES
[1]. After duly noting the general's strong hint, Major Marcel returned to
Roswell immediately and maintained a commendable silence for years
thereafter.

[2]. A request for information re releasing UFO reports was directed to President
Carter by the authors in 1979 because of inquiries they had received in this
matter from persons throughout the world, in the above case, especially, from
India. A reply was received from the White House stating that the President had
asked NASA about the advisability of reopening UFO investigation but that
NASA had replied that an investigation did not seem warranted "in light of the
fact that there has been no concrete or new information about UFOs."

[3]. Part of the material relating to the Lake Onega incident, described in this
chapter, was translated directly from the Russian notes of Professor Ziegel by
William Moore.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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