Charles

BERLITZ & William L. MOORE

THE ROSWELL INCIDENT

Crosset & Dunlap NY., 1980

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 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

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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 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

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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.

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 Contents
Cover
Title Page
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

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 Chapter 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 sangfroid.
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

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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 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

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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

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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 sight-ings 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?

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..."

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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 AT, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Time: July 7, 1947, at four o'clock in the afternoon.

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 Charter 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;

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"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.

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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 east, and estimated them to be at a height of
about 1,000 feet above the mountaintops.

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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 ground. Also it was not falling as fast as meteors do."

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 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.

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 Chapter 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

17
 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. 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

18
 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 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

19
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" 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

20
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
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."

21
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,

22
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 . . Moore, aerologist and physicist currently with the
New 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

23
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."

. . 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

24
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
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.

25
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 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

26
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.

27
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.

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.

28
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

29
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 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...

30
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
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.

31
 Chapter 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.

32
 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

33
 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

34
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 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

35
 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 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.

36
- 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.

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 Carry-all. 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 the 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

37
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 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

38
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 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
Carry-all, 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...

39
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 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.

40
 - So what you're saying is that this whole weather-balloon thing was
nothing but 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.
Marcel was naturally interested in flying and also in space travel. He was

41
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

42
 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. He wrote the story and distributed the release.

Haut was informed that Major Marcel had been on the plane that had taken the

43
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. 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.)

44
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 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

45
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 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

46
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 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

47
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 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

48
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 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,

49
 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 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

50
 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 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 Brazel called Mac?

- We used to call him Mac because, when he was a baby, he looked just

51
 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 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?

52
 - 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 Whit-more, Jr., remembers that his
father hid Brazel at the Whit-more 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 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

53
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

54
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 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.

55
 Chapter 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

56
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
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.

57
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
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

58
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. 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

59
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.

60
 - 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 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.

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 Chapter 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

62
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
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.

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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 Stringfield. 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
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

64
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.

65
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.

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 Chapter 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

67
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 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 Controller 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 Saucers Are Real by Don Keyhoe. Both books dealt mostly
with the sightings of UFOs and both claim that the flying objects were

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 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 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

69
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 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

70
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.

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

71
 "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
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.

72
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 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. (Ei-senhower, 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

73
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 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.

74
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 the crashed disc and the
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.

75
 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
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.

76
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.

77
 Chapter 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

78
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 Asked For It and
requested a rerun of the newsreel on TV, he was informed that the news-reel
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
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

79
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 President-is 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.

80
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 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

81
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).

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

82
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

83
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

84
 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

85
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

86
 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, formal 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
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

87
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.

88
 Chapter 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.

89
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
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

90
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 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:

91
 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 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

92
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 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 the Jansen 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

93
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 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.

94
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

95
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.

96
 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.

97
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books, Magazines, and Other Publications

Barker, Gray. "America's Captured Flying Saucers-Cover-up of the Century,"

UFO Report (May 1977), p. 32 ff.

Cahn, J. P. "The Flying Saucer and the Mysterious Little Men," True
September 1952), p. 17. ----"The Flying Saucer Swindlers," True (December
1955), p. 66.

Carr, Prof. R. S. (letter from), in "Contact," Official UFO February 1976), p.

8.

Chatelain, Maurice. Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space. New York:
Doubleday, 1977.

Crabb, Reilly H. Flying Saucers at Edwards AFB. Vista, Calif.: BSRF Press,
n.d. Davidson, Dr. Leon, Ph.D., ed. Flying Saucers, An Analysis of Air Force
Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. Clarksburg, W. Va.: Saucerian
Press, 1971.

Faucher, Eric; Goodstein, Ellen; and Gris, Henry. "Alien UFOs Watched Our
First Astronauts on the Moon." National Enquirer (September 12, 1979), p.
25.

"Flying Saucer Hoax," Saturday Review of Literature (December 6, 1952), p.

6.

Gelatt, Roland. "Saucer from Venus," Saturday Review of Literature,

(September 23, 1950), p. 20.

Hall, Richard H., ed. The UFO Evidence. Washington, D.C.: NICAP, 1964.

"History of the 8th Air Force, Ft. Worth, Texas" (microfilm). National
Archives, Washington, D.C.

"History of Roswell Army Air Force, 427th Base Unit & 509 Bomb Group
(VH), combined," (microfilm). National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Hurt, W. R. Jr.; and McKnight, Daniel. "Archaeology of the San Agustin

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Table of Contents
Title Page 2
Introduction 3
Contents 6
Chapter 1- UFOs in the Sky and in Space 7
Chapter 2 - Incident at Roswell 12
Chapter 3 - The AAF Confronts a Crashed UFO and Dead
17
Extraterrestrials
Chapter 4 - Witnesses Speak - the Town Remembers 32
Chapter 5 - Descriptions of the Aliens 56
Chapter 6 - Holes in the Cover-up 62
Chapter 7 - The President and the Captured Saucer 67
Chapter 8 - "Top Secret" Forever - the AVRO Alternative 78
Chapter 9 - The Russian Connection 89
Footnotes 97
Bibliography 98

101