The Roswell Incident

**THE ROSWELL**
 Crosset & Dunlap NY, 1980

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

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

Events which had been reported in the press and by radio
before security regulations were imposed by the Army Air
Force (whose name was changed to the Air Force in that very
year, 1947) indicate that material from the wrecked UFO was
shuttled by high-security government transportation from base
to base and that the remains of the UFO and the dead
occupants (one of whom was reportedly alive when found) are
under high-security guard at CIA headquarters at Langley,
Virginia.
Those of us who can recall the years before 1947, which was
the year of the first well-publicized saucer “invasion,”
remember reading purportedly factual accounts about what
might have been called saucers long before they became
popular. These were puzzling reports, carried in
meteorological and astronomical journals, containing
references to giant airborne objects in the night sky, neither
airships nor meteors.

An example from the Monthly Weather Review (March 1904):
Lieutenant Frank H. Schofield, commanding the U.S:S.
Supply, reported that he and his crew on February 24, 1904,
had clearly viewed three enormous luminous objects moving
in unison across the night sky, far at sea in the Atlantic, with
the largest of them having a diameter six times that of the sun.

In like vein the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of
Canada (March 1913) carried a compilation of reports by
Professor Chant of Toronto about unidentified flying objects
crossing east to west along the U.S.-Canadian border at a time
that subsequent checks revealed no “human” airships had been
aloft that night. The reports, gathered from a great number of
observers along the route, agreed that a huge luminous body
traveled straight across the sky, that the “body was composed
of three or four parts with a tail to each part” and as it
disappeared a second and third grouping followed. “There
were probably thirty or thirty-two such bodies during the
period of an hour... they moved in fours, threes, and twos,
abreast of one another. So perfect was this line-up that it
seemed almost as if an aerial fleet were maneuvering...”

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

Nevertheless, extreme interest in UFOs is still considered
something of an aberration, possibly because no concrete
proof of any such craft is known to have been found or
identified as such. In effect there is no corpus delecti.

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

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

Since the space age began it has often been suggested that we
of the human race of earth are on the brink of making contact
with some of our neighbors in the cosmos and obtaining final
proof that ours is not the only life form in our galaxy. Perhaps
this already happened in New Mexico in 1947 and only now,
with the discovery of new information and the eventual help of
the Freedom of Information Act, will the consequences
become apparent.

1 UFOs in the Sky and in Space
UFOs were really never new. Throughout history, whenever
men watched the heavens, they saw or believed they saw
flying figures, signs, portents, gods, angels, devils, ships, and,
in recent times, having lost an earlier faith, they have seen
types of aircraft that apparently come from no earthly base.
We have no way of calculating how many of these visions
have been caused by misinterpretation or a productive
imagination. However, if even 20 percent of these sightings
are without earthly explanation, as has been suggested by the
data in Air Force Project Blue Book, Special Report No. 14,
then there must have been millions of unexplained visitors to
the skies of earth since the human species first began to record
their impressions of celestial visitors.

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

As the ancient world became Christianized, the aerial sight-
ings became fiery crosses and other threatening signs of doom
foretelling plagues and disasters. The Emperor Constantine of
Byzantium saw something in the sky before a battle that

convinced him to become a Christian, considerably changing
thereby the course of history.

When the Renaissance opened up people’s minds to the
exploration of the world, UFOs appropriately took the forms
of galleys and caravels, and then, as the French first began
experimenting with balloons, certain vast globes were seen
floating in the upper heavens, almost as monstrous reflections
of what the French were doing. Starting in the late 1800s,
relatively modern observers have 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
and an outspoken documentalist of one special phase of close
encounters in space by explorers (U.S.) from earth with
entities from elsewhere. According to Chatelain’s accounts,
some of which are based on information picked up from
“inside sources” while working for NASA in the 1960s, and
other relying on data passed on to him later by friends and
former colleagues, reports of these encounters made during
flights in space have generally been censored, altered, de-
emphasized, or simply ignored by NASA and therefore never
reached the public at the time of their occurrence. The fact that
the astronauts were on military duty was, according to
Chatelain, a great and perhaps planned advantage for secrecy
inasmuch as they could simply be ordered not to discuss
aspects of their UFO encounters. Although the majority of
U.S. astronauts are no longer on active duty, they have
steadfastly maintained a discreet silence on this topic right up
to the present day, leaving us with only Chatelain’s “inside”
accounts to hint at what might really have gone on in space

and even over the surface of the moon. These, to say the least,
are visibly impressive...

Additional confirmation that the Apollo 11 astronauts had
indeed experienced some strange moments on their five-day
flight to the moon and back comes from a source apparently
associated with Anglia TV in London. According to this
source, NASA was forced to change the originally intended
landing site for the Eagle lander module because it was
discovered that the first site was “crawling’-presumably with
somebody else’s space hardware. As evidence, the Anglia
source cites the following allegedly “deleted” bit of
conversation, obtained through an unnamed intermediary,
purported to have taken place between astronaut Colonel
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and NASA Mission Control sometime
prior to the lunar landing on July 20, 1969.

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

Mission Control: What’s there?... [garbled malfunction]...
Mission Control calling Apollo 11 ...

Aldrin: These babies were huge, sir... enormous... Oh God,
you wouldn’t believe it!... I’m telling you there are other
spacecraft out here... lined up on the far side of the crater
edge.... They’re on the moon watching us. ...

Although several of the astronauts have flatly denied
experiencing UFO sightings in space, and NASA is reported to
have dismissed one of its employees for allegedly selling
“falsified tape recordings” of conversations similar to the one
above, Chatelain maintains that his information is of the most
reliable sort and has published this information in his books in
France, England, and the United States. (See Bibliography) In
his words: “All Apollo or Gemini flights were followed, both
at a distance and sometimes... quite closely, by space vehicles
of extraterrestrial origin. Every time it occurred, the astronauts
informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence.”

And, of course, these sightings do not include Russian 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 1s 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...”

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 KO AT, Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
Time: July 7, 1947, at four o’clock in the afternoon.

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

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

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

This time, according to her recollections, he seemed not only
excited but under pressure and apparently speaking to
someone else at the same time. His voice seemed strained.
“Wait a minute, I’ll get back to you.... Wait.... Pll get right

back.” But he did not. Instead the teletype went on again by
itself and started addressing Albuquerque, or Lydia, directly.
The sender was not identified and the tone was formal and
curt: ATTENTION ALBUQUERQUE: DO NOT TRANSMIT.
REPEAT DO NOT TRANSMIT THIS MESSAGE. STOP
COMMUNICATION IMMEDIATELY.

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

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

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

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

Especially interesting, however, is that many of the people he
tried to talk to about it insisted that the object had come down
in the area west of Socorro, New Mexico, rather than near
Roswell, and that a sheriff’s deputy from that town had been
to the spot and had viewed the wreckage of some sort of
saucer-shaped object along with a small burned patch of
ground. “Then all of a sudden,” he recalled in a recent
interview, “we couldn’t find anything or anyone who would
talk about it.” Tucker himself, while he vividly recalled the
incident, was reluctant to be interviewed about the matter, and

absolutely refused to allow the interview to be taped. Nuclear
physicist and researcher Stanton T. Friedman met with a
similar wall of silence when he located and tried to interview
McBoyle on the same topic. McBoyle’s reaction: “Forget
about it. ... It never happened.”

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

These subsequent reports indicated a swirling UFO activity by
night and by day 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.

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.”

July 1, 1947: Max Hood, an executive of the Albuquerque
Chamber of Commerce, reported seeing a bluish disc
zigzagging across the northwestern sky over Albuquerque.

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

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

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

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

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

It is interesting to consider that, at the very beginning of the
1947 UFO flap, and attested to by witnesses, press releases,
interviews, radio reports, and uninhibited by censorship that
came too late, the Army Air Force came into possession of a
bona-fide UFO together with the remains of its crew. And
apparently since that time the Air Force and the United States
Government have been trying to decide what to do with it.

3 The AAF Confronts a Crashed UFO and Dead Extraterrestrials
At about ten minutes to ten on the evening of July 2, 1947,
local hardware dealer Dan Wilmot and his wife were sitting on
the front porch of their South Penn Street home in Roswell,
New Mexico, enjoying a cool respite from what had been one
of those hot New Mexico summer days. In Wilmot’s words,
“All of a sudden a big glowing object zoomed out of the sky
from the southeast. It was going northwest [toward Corona,
New Mexico] at a high rate of speed.”

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

Concerned that he might be leaving himself open to ridicule,
Wilmot, described by the Roswell Daily Record as “one of the
most respected and reliable citizens in town,” kept silent about
his experience for nearly a week in hopes that “someone else
would come out and tell about having seen one.”

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

On July 8, one day after Mrs. Sleppy’s unusual incident with
the TWX teletype machine, Lieutenant Walter Haut, public
information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base, acting on
information beginning to filter in to the Roswell Air Base,

jumped the gun in a burst of excitement and enthusiastically
issued the following release to members of the press without
first bothering to obtain the authorization of his base
commander, Colonel William Blanchard-an oversight he was
to be made painfully aware of later:

Roswell Army Air Base, Roswell, N.M. 8th July, 1947.A.M.
The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality
yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb
Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was
fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the
cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office
of Chaves County.

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

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

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

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

The Roswell Daily Record rushed into print on July 8 with the
following report, captioned RAAF CAPTURES FLYING
SAUCER IN ROSWELL REGION. NO DETAILS OF

FLYING DISCS ARE REVEALED. The following article
implied both a solution of the Flying

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

The Intelligence Office of the 509th Bombardment group at
Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today that the
field has come into possession of a flying saucer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When we first noticed it about 10:00 A.M. we thought it
resembled a feather because it was oscillating. Then we
noticed its great speed and decided it was a flying saucer. Our
guesses are that it was moving at between 200 and 600 miles
per hour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the broadcast, in response to a question from a group of
still skeptical Fort Worth press reporters about where the
remains of the alleged “weather device” were at that moment,
Ramey snapped irritably, “It’s in my office, and it will
probably stay right there!” He then repeated for the reporters
what he had just said on the air: “The special flight to Wright
Field has been canceled, gentlemen. This whole affair has
been most unfortunate, but in light of the excitement that has

been stirred up lately about these so-called flying discs, it is
not surprising. Now let’s all go home and call it an evening.”

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

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

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

As Newton recollects, he had neither seen nor heard anything
about the Roswell Incident on July 7. But on the night of July
8, as he was working in the Weather Office, the phone rang. It
was General Ramey. The general ordered Newton to report to
his office immediately. Newton, in spite of a certain urgency in
the general’s tone, nevertheless found the courage to inform

the general that he was the only man on duty in the Weather
Office and as such he was also in charge of flight-control
operations that evening. To Newton’s mildly couched protest
the general replied with a decisive command flair: “Get your
ass over here in ten minutes. If you can’t get a car
commandeer the first one that comes along-on my orders.”

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

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

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

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

- What happened after your identification of the object?

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

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

- Certainly. You would have to’be careful not to tear it. The

metal involved was likely an extremely thin Alcoa wrap. It
was very flimsy.

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

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

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

Considerable information about the construction and purpose
of weather and other scientific- purpose balloons used in the

late 1940s was obtained in a series of interviews with C. B.
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”.

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.”

C. B. Moore’s description of a Rawin target device, of which
he had seen and handled many, was also important in that it
strongly reinforced the belief that anyone finding such “flimsy

foil and balsa- wood material” would have had great difficulty
in confusing it with anything out of the ordinary.

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

Now, on July 9, a rash of denials appeared in the press.

The Dallas Morning News: SUSPECTED “DISC” ONLY
FLYING WEATHER VANE

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

The Roswell Daily Record ran an eight-column headline:
GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER, with a
subtitle introducing the theme of the lead article: General
Ramey says disc is weather balloon.

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

anything else besides a bomb, they are going to have a hard
time getting me to say anything about it.”

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

AND NOW WHAT IS IT?

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

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

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

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

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

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

This last example, a technique of treating UFO reports as
being made by persons who were either drunk or eccentric

visionaries has, of course, been frequently employed by the
media from 1947 on.

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

Although there is no doubt that Colonel Blanchard would
certainly have followed without question Ramey’s orders
about how to deal with the alleged flying disc, he would also
have possessed sufficient qualifications to have known
whether he was dealing with the remains of a weather balloon.
Blanchard, who was later destined to attain the rank of three-
star general, was, in 1947, already a highly decorated war hero
with a distinguished war record as commander of bomb groups
in the Pacific and later as operations officer of the Twentieth
Air Force. Although few knew it at the time, Blanchard had
come within a hair’s breadth of being chosen as one of the
pilots designated to drop America’s first atom bombs on Japan
in 1945. He was beaten out in the competition only by the two
who actually dropped the bombs.

Although General Blanchard is now dead, his widow recently
confirmed (interview with Stanton Friedman) that her husband
knew that the wreckage that he had sent to Carswell did not
belong to any balloon. “He knew it was nothing made by us,”
she said, noting that “At first he thought it might be Russian
because of the strange symbols on it. Later on, he realized it
wasn’t Russian either.”

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

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

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

Lieutenant Colonel Jennings, who temporarily assumed
command of the base after Colonel Blanchard’s departure, was
to suffer a far stranger fate. Not too long after the Roswell
Incident, while en route to England on a special assignment,
his plane disappeared while flying over the Bermuda Triangle
without sending a last message. No trace of the plane or of any
survivors was ever found. Major Marcel had been scheduled to
go on the same flight, but fortunately was pulled off upon the
personal intervention of Colonel Blanchard.

The initial reports about the landing of a “flying disc” had
already been widely spread by radio stations other than KSWS
in Roswell, doubtlessly based on the first press release and in
spite of the subsequent news blackout. Flight Major Hughie
Green, of the British RAF, then en route by car from
California to Philadelphia, was driving through New Mexico
during July 1947. He remembers clearly what he heard on his
car radio:

“As I drove through New Mexico from west to east, I kept
hearing these reports about a downed saucer on local stations
as I came within the radius of each one. I was especially
interested in the reports because of being in the RAF myself
and remembering the wartime flap about “foo fighters’’-the
flying saucers of those days. The radio stations I was listening

to were so on edge that they kept interrupting their regular
broadcasts to give the latest developments. I am certain that
one of the news broadcasts commented on the fact that the
sheriff and his men were proceeding towards the field of the
crash within sight of the wreckage.

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

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

Even so, Mrs. Frank Scully, widow of the writer, interviewed
by Bill Moore at her home in June and December 1979,
steadfastly maintained that the basic story behind her
husband’s book was correct and that he had been vilified

because of it-particularly by J. P. Cahn, a “most unscrupulous
journalist from San Francisco” who may have been paid off to
do “the hatchet job” on Scully. It is true that Cahn’s article on
Scully and his book is full of exaggerations and inaccuracies.
Unfortunately other journalists followed Cahn’s account
without bothering to check his accuracy. In any event, it was
indeed Cahn’s article that proved most damaging.

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

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

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

book was the one that gave us the most headaches because it
was the closest to the truth.” (Italics added)

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

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

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

This further reference to a Roswell-type incident was, of
course, denied in official circles with the customary
vehemence. However, it must not be forgotten that Fletcher
Pratt was a reputable military historian with a historian’s
regard for the highest possible accuracy of information and
therefore would have been reticent to accept a report dealing
with startling information from an unreliable source. Pratt was

also (to the author’s knowledge) familiar with the
requirements of military security and, even if at first
convinced of the accuracy of his source, could have been later
persuaded to let the matter drop in the interests of security.

In any event, the commotion engendered by the alleged
capture of a UFO appears to have resulted in a continued close
Army Air Force surveillance of UFOs with reports running
into the thousands, all of which finally culminated in 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 [1.e., UFOs] when the object

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

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

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

In any case, since the UFO security procedures had not been
sufficiently established in 1947, the incident was widely
disseminated before it was smothered. Like many other
legends, it seems to possess an extraordinary power of survival
and has been repeatedly revived, sometimes, as we shall see,
by direct presidential request. Furthermore, witnesses of the
incident and secondary witnesses-those who first spoke to the
direct witnesses-are still alive and remember details with
commendable recall. A cross-check of their recollections
indicates a general agreement with the different aspects
contained in the first reports of the fallen disc, or whatever it
really was.

4 Witnesses Speak - the Town Remembers
Barney Barnett, a resident of Socorro, New Mexico, a civil
engineer working for the federal government in soil
conservation, was one of the first witnesses to arrive at the site
of the fallen saucer, sometime in the morning of July 3, 1947.

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

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

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

“I was out on assignment, working near Magdalena, New
Mexico, one morning when light reflecting off some sort of
large metallic object caught my eye. Thinking that a plane may
have crashed during the night, I went over to where it was-
about a mile, perhaps a mile and a quarter away on flat desert
land. By the time I got there, I realized it wasn’t a plane at all,
but some sort of metallic, disc- shaped object about twenty-
five or thirty feet across. While I was looking at it and trying

to decide what it was, some other people came up from the
other direction and began looking around it too. They told me
later that they were a part of an archaeological research team
from some eastern university [the University of Pennsylvania]
and that they too had first thought a plane had crashed. They
were all over the place looking at the wreck.

I noticed that they were standing around looking at some dead
bodies that haa 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 ina
truck with a driver and took control. He told everybody that
the Army was taking over and to get out of the way. Other
military personnel came up and cordoned off the area. We
were told to leave the area and not to talk to anyone whatever
about what we had seen... that it was our patriotic duty to
remain silent...»

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

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

Barnett called the creatures “males.” There was no mention of
females. There were a number of them, but I can’t remember
how many he said there were. He repeated several times that
their eyes were small and oddly spaced.

The object was soon moved away from the crash site. They
brought in a large truck. Whoever was involved with it asked
the spectators to leave. This included the University of
Pennsylvania people. Everyone was told to leave the area and
not to talk about it to anyone, because to do so would be
unpatriotic”.

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

As Barney Barnett’s reported version of the incident is so
complete and ties in so neatly with other reports it is pertinent
to consider his reputation in the area and whether or not he
was especially imaginative or visionary.

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

Holm Bursum, Jr., bank executive, former mayor of Socorro,
and son of Holm Bursum, Sr., former U.S. senator from New

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

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

Lee Garner, former cowboy and later sheriff of Socorro
County, remembers Barney Barnett favorably and especially
remembers the archaeological expedition, doubtlessly because
of his own interest in Indian archaeology. He thought the
expedition was from Michigan, but said there may have been
Pennsylvania students involved with it. John Greenwald, a
former federal government employee and now a retired farmer
in Socorro County, recalled that 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 tt.

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

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

- 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 th’e evening several days earlier
during an electrical storm, but paid no special attention to it at
the time because he had attributed it to just a freak part of the
storm. He didn’t find the wreckage until the next morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- What was especially interesting about the material?

- One thing that impressed me about the debris was the fact
that a lot of it looked like parchment. It had little numbers with
symbols that we had to call hieroglyphics because I could not
understand them. They could not be read, they were just like

symbols, something that meant something, and they were not
all the same, but the same general pattern, I would say. They
were pink and purple. They looked like they were painted on.
These little numbers could not be broken, could not be burned.
I even took my cigarette lighter and tried to burn 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...

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.

- 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:

- [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 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 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 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.) 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 1s 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 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 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
the 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 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 tt, 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 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, 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 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 Brayl called Mac? - We used to
call him Mac because, when he was a baby, he looked just like

President McKinley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Yes. It looked like numbers mostly, at least I assumed them
to be numbers. They were written out like you would write
numbers in columns to do an addition problem. But they didn’t
look like the numbers we use at all. What gave me the idea
they were numbers, I guess, was the way they were all ranged
out in columns.

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

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

Finally, there is the question and sequence of Brazel’s
interview by KGFL Radio of Roswell, New Mexico. He was
allegedly interviewed at the time of the incident on a wire
recorder by W. E. Whitmore, then owner of KGFL, who
planned to use the information as a “scoop” on the Mutual
wire. W. E. Whitmore is now dead, but his son, Walt 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 what Slowie
advised and to obey the FCC directive. Whitmore complied
with alacrity.

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

Several days later Whitmore, Jr., ventured out to the site and
found a stretch of about 175-200 yards ofpastureland uprooted
in a sort of fan-like pattern with most of the damage at the
narrowest part of the fan. He said that whatever it was “just
cleaned it [the area] out... The Army Air Force searched
around out there for two days and cleaned out everything. I
recall hearing that everything was taken to Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Ohio after the Army Air Force had tried to
piece the stuff together in Roswell. No one I talked to seemed
to know exactly what it was, but I heard the ‘flying saucer’
explanation talked about quite a bit.”

He added that the largest piece of this material that he saw was
about four or five inches square, and that it was very much like
lead foil in appearance but could not be torn or cut at all. It
was extremely light in weight.

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

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

case of the saucer itself and its ill-fated crew, it had by chance
come down near the spot where Barnett was scheduled to do a
survey job the next morning and the archaeology students
were scheduled to begin their dig.

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

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

This hastily assembled military-scientific group may have
furnished the first approximate physical description of the
occupants of the saucer and answered the question as to
whether “they” were unlucky human test pilots or travelers
from another world who had found their final destination on
ours.

5 Descriptions of the Aliens
Meade Layne, now deceased, former director of Borderland
Sciences Research Foundation, Vista, California, made some
memos, probably in 1949, concerning reports on some of the
alleged participants in this scientific “call-up.” A memo has
been furnished by Mr. Reilly Crabb, present director of
Borderland Sciences Research Foundation.

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

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

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

Dr. Weisberg’s other testimony is especially interesting in that
he suggests how the UFO got to its destination at Edwards Air
Force Base. According to his recollection, it was taken by
truck to Magdalena, in Guadalupe County, where it was put on
a special car of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, which had
been brought down from Vaughn. It was “kept under wraps”
passing through Belen, Grants, and Galiup in New Mexico,

Flagstaff, Arizona, to Needles and Cadiz in California and
finally to Muroc, where Camp Edwards is located.

While we cannot be certain which material went to Fort Worth
and which to Muroc, apparently shipments in both directions
took place: the disc and its occupants to Muroc and the
unusual wreckage to Fort Worth, and then on to 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.

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 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,

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 Aur 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 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:

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

e 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.

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

e Eyes are large and deep-set or sunken, far apart, and
slightly slanted.
e No ear lobes or extending flesh beyond apertures noted
on each side of the head.
e Nose is formless, with nares indicated by only a slight
protuberance.

e 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.

e Neck is relatively thin.

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

e 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.

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

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

e 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.

6 Holes in the Cover-up
Despite the efforts of the AAF and thereafter the government
to keep the entire matter (and their own research concerning
the craft and its crew) under high-security classification,
rumors have continued to surface throughout the years,
sometimes from Edwards Air Force Base, sometimes from the
Pentagon, or from Langley, Virginia (CIA headquarters). Some
of these rumors come from security personnel who have been
transferred to other duties or have retired and therefore tend to
consider the matter with a mixture of nostalgia and
permissiveness. The rumors sometimes corroborate and
sometimes add new material.

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

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

A chance meeting on a train revealed some specific details,
somewhat at odds with other descriptions of the aliens. Bill
Devlin, an employee of a radio and television servicing
company, en route in the spring of 1952 to Washington from
Philadelphia, found a vacant seat next to a soldier who was
reading a Philadelphia newspaper. Devlin was especially
intrigued by an article the soldier was reading concerning a
wave of UFO sightings over the Main Line of Philadelphia.
Noting the interest of Devlin, who was reading over his
shoulder, the soldier said: “This article here. I could tell you a
lot more about this if you 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.

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

There were a variety of reports from Edwards Air Force Base,
all unattributed but quite persistent. It is interesting to note as a
mark of the efficiency of security, regulations that two of the
informants were adamant not only in refusing the use of their
names but even to having Edwards AFB mentioned lest their
connection with the security force lead to their detection. One
MP confided to a relative, and later to the author, that the
bodies kept at Edwards were separated, some being kept “on
ice” at Edwards and others sent to Washington for further
dissection. A CID (Criminal Investigation Division) agent, in

speaking of a “crashed UFO kept at Edwards,” mentioned that
a special technical research team studied the artifact for
months but were unable to cut into the metal for purposes of
examination and molecular or atomic identification.

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

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

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

At one point during the course of her assignment, she said, she
had witnessed the conveyance of two humanoid bodies by cart
from one room to another. She not only saw the bodies but

personally handled the paper work on their autopsy reports.
These bodies, preserved in some type of chemical solution,
were between four and five feet tall, with generally human-
like features except that the heads were large relative to the
bodies and the eyes were slanted. She did not know whether
the bodies had been brought in from a recent crash or had been
on the base from some previous incident.

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

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

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

In 1956 an RB-47 reconnaissance plane, especially equipped
with electronic radar gear, was followed by a UFO for more
than an hour over the Gulf of Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Texas, and finally Oklahoma before it finally disappeared. If
radar could affect the operation of UFOs, this would have been
a case in point, unless, of course, more recent UFOs possess
counterdevices.

The concept of challenge, combat, or conquest, certainly a
consideration always present on an earthly level, has naturally
been extended by earthly thinkers to UFOs and their possible
intentions. For this reason it is relatively easy for one to
explain the increasingly numerous sightings of UFOs from
1947 on, and, too, extraterrestrial curiosity about what was
going on at White Sands and how far the denizens of a

relatively minor planet were progressing in unleashing, for
good or bad, the latent powers of the universe.

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

But the above selection of credible and incredible rumors,
scuttlebutt, “confidential” reports, and twice-told tales,
fantastic though they may seem, often corroborate the original
precensorship radio and press reports as well as the testimony
of on-the-spot witnesses. In any case they kept the crashed-
saucer incident very much alive for years. By 1954, therefore,
seven years after the reputed occurrence, they attracted the
attention of someone in what may be termed a position of
“supreme power.” He assuredly had enough power, in any
case, to do something about it. This person was Dwight
Eisenhower, President of the United States.

7 The President and the Captured Saucer
Doubtlessly because of his military background, General
Eisenhower was probably more aware of the importance of
chance intelligence than other Presidents of this era (who,
although having had military experience, were not military
careerists), more interested in intelligence of a military
potential, and certainly better able to evaluate it. During his
first term as President, Eisenhower began to make inquiries
into the reality of the “Roswell saucer capture.”

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

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

logically contemplated and would therefore be in a position to
control the planet earth.

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

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

Wilbert B. Smith, as senior radio engineer of the Department
of Transport and head of that department’s Broadcast and
Measurements Section, was evidently designated to be one of
the Canadian representatives to a 1950 National Association of
Radio Broadcasting (NARB) conference in Washington, D.C.
Smith was particularly interested in research concerning the

possibility of developing power sources utilizing the earth’s
own magnetic field.

Pertinent parts of this formerly “Top Secret” memo
(downgraded to “Confidential” September 15, 1969) follow:

Memorandum to the Comptroller of Telecommunications

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

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

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

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

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

(b) Flying saucers exist.

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

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

Particularly relevant to this memo is a letter attached to it
dated September 15, 1969, authorizing the downgrading of
classification from “Top Secret” to “Confidential,” and stating
that “at no time should [this information] be made available to
the public.”

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

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 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 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 “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.

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 McIntyre 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 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.

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

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

More recently, a former high-level member in one of the
departments under Eisenhower, now living in Arizona, has
confirmed privately to friends that Ike did indeed visit Muroc
in 1954 to see the remains of thecrashed disc and the bodies,
and that the trip had been made from Palm Springs by
helicopter.

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

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

July 8, 1947: Four separate sightings of unidentified disc-
shaped objects were observed over Muroc Air Force Base and
Rogers Dry Lake secret testing site in California. One object
passed over above an F-51 aircraft at a time when no known
aircraft was in the vicinity.

August 31, 1948: Large unknown object trailing blue flame
exhaust nearly one mile long was reported cruising at 50,000
feet above U.S. Air Force Base at Muroc. Civilian pilot Bob

Hanley and two passengers reported seeing the same or similar
object over Mint Canyon at 12:15 A.M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the Blue Room contained an answer. But whatever
was inside was evidently regarded as so secret that it could not
be visited even by top air force generals.

8 “Top Secret” Forever - the AVRO Alternative
If the United States Government actually did manage to pick
up enough pieces of the Roswell object roughly to determine
what it was and something of how it operated, it would
therefore be understandable that it would be treated as “Top
Secret” during the life of existing security regulations. This
would seem to be especially necessary since an increasing
number of foreign nations would wish to obtain what could
perhaps be the ultimate secret weapon. Then again, perhaps
other UFOs had already crashed or might crash in other parts
of the world and other nations would be in possession of other
parts of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle whose successful solution
would give the nation in question the secret of flight at
incredible velocity and without the use of fuels as we presently
conceive them.

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

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

The sergeant was led to another hangar “where security
precautions were not so stringent but that his uniform and ID
card got him into the side office and shop area.” The two
proceeded to an upper level where there were offices with side
windows overlooking the hangar floor below-all of which
were heavily curtained. On the floor ahead was a red line
beyond which a guard would let no one pass without proper
authorization. The pilot whispered to the sergeant to wait for
him there and, while waiting, to catch a look through a slightly
parted curtain behind him at what was on the hangar deck
directly below.

The pilot went on through security and, since the guard
seemed unconcerned, the sergeant took what he described to
Crabb as a “good look.” What he saw was a “saucer-shaped
craft sitting on high landing gear. It was completely circular
with sharp edges sloping up to a domed cockpit area in the
center. It looked as if it were capable of carrying at least two,
perhaps three, persons, and [was] probably twenty- five to
thirty feet in diameter overall.” There were service personnel
dressed in the usual air-force-blue coveralls moving around the
craft as it sat there.

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

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

Reilly Crabb’s informant transferred to Vietnam shortly after
their conversation where, Crabb believes, he met his death in
action.

In seeming confirmation of the likelihood that at least some
governmental research has been carried out on a saucer-like
disc-shaped craft is a persistent rumor that such an object was
indeed test-flown over Nellis AFB in Nevada during 1965,

stored for a period of time, and then test-flown again,
presumably with some additional modifications, in 1974.
Some informants claim to have seen such a plane, referred to
as the “Flying Flapjack,” in a commercial newsreel. When one
such witness wrote the TV program Tow 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 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 (SUSC-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.

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 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 [1.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 Air
Force did indeed cooperate with the FBI on this case.

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

TELETYPE
FBI DALLAS
7-8-47
6-17 PM
DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI
URGENT FLYING DISC, INFORMATION CONCERNING.
[Censored], HEADQUARTERS EIGHTH AIR FORCE,
TELEPHONICALLY ADVISED THIS OFFICE THAT AN
OBJECT PURPORTING TO BE A FLYING DISC WAS RE
COVERED [sic] NEAR ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, THIS
DATE... (Censored) FURTHER ADVISED THAT THE
OBJECT FOUND RESEMBLES A HIGH ALTITUDE
WEATHER BALLOON WITH A RADAR REFLECTOR,
BUT THAT TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN
THEIR OFFICE AND WRIGHT FIELD HAD NOT BORNE

OUT THIS BELIEF: DISC AND BALLOON BEING
TRANSPORTED TO WRIGHT FIELD BY SPECIAL PLANE
FOR EXAMINATION. [Italics added] INFORMATION
PROVIDED THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL
INTEREST IN CASE AND FACT THAT NATIONAL
BROADCASTING COMPANY? ASSOCIATED PRESS
AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF
LOCATION OF DISC TODAY. (Censored) ADVISED
WOULD REQUEST WRIGHT FIELD TO ADVISE
CINCINNATI OFFICE RESULTS OF EXAMINATION....
WYLY
END

Upon analysis of this all-important piece of communication,
several points become immediately apparent:

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

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

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

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

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

7-30-47
BUREAU BULLETIN No. 42
Series 1947

You should investigate each instance which 1s brought to your
attention of a sighting of a flying disc in order to ascertain
whether or not is. is [sic] a bona-fide sighting, an imaginary
one or a prank. You should also bear in mind that individuals
might report seeing flying discs for various reasons. It is
conceivable that an individual might be desirous of seeking
personal publicity, causing hysteria or playing a prank.

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

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

OFF. COPY FILED
AUG 4, 1947

Even though the above documents clearly indicate extensive
FBI involvement in the investigation of flying saucers, this
involvement was later covered up and denied by the bureau. In

the authors’ possession are copies of several letters from the
FBI dated between 1966 and 1972 and written in response to
public inquiries regarding the nature and extent of the FBI’s
involvement with the flying-disc phenomenon. In each of
these letters, all signed by J. Edgar Hoover, the stock response
is given: “For your information, the investigation of
Unidentified Flying Objects is not and never has been a matter
that is within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI.”

Still another unexpected find turned up among the reports
released. This was a memo, dated 23 September 1947, from
General Nathan Twining of the Air Force and was sent by him
as commander of the AAF Air Materiel Command, directed to
the Air Technical Intelligence Command at Dayton, Ohio,
which had apparently requested his office for guidance about
“flying discs.” An excerpt from this memo follows:

23 September 1947
Subject: AMC Opinion Concerning “Flying Discs”
TO: Commanding General
Army Air Forces
Washington 25, D.C.
ATTENTION: Brig. General George Schulgen
AC/AS-2

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

2. It is the opinion that:

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

b. There are objects probably approximately the shape of a
disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as
man-made aircraft.

c. There is a possibility that some of the incidents may be
caused by natural phenomenon, such as meteors.

d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates
of climb, manueverability (particularly in roll), and action
which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted
by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that
some of the objects are controlled either manually,
automatically or remotely.

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

(1) Metallic or light reflecting surface.

(2) Absence of trail, except in a few instances when the object
apparently was operating under high performance conditions.

(3) Circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on
top.

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

(5) Normally no associated sound, except in three instances a
substantial rumbling roar was noted...

It is understandable that the Twining memo makes no
reference to the Roswell disc, but the date of the document,
barely two and a half months after the incident, and the fact
that the memo accepts the reality of “flying discs” are
indicative of the official climate of urgency generated by the
Roswell Incident.

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

Anticipating just such a response, CAUS had already filed a
FOIA request with the Air Force the month before specifically

requesting crashed-saucer records for 1947-48 and listing as
participants in the incident a retired USAF colonel who
reportedly “was in charge of securing the area during the
recovery operation” and a retirefcl lieutenant colonel who had
been airborne at the time of the alleged crash and had been
alerted to the object’s intrusion into U.S. air space by radio
reports over his aircraft’s scramble frequency.

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

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

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

But on the surface, at least, the climate of official cooperation
has undergone a recent temperate change. Requests for

information about UFOs are now being met or at least
acknowledged with considerable alacrity. Exceptions must be
made, of course, for the important cases of which the
happening at Roswell may be classified as a key and, in a way,
as a preview of the future.

Consider the implications of the Roswell Incident: If only one
of the many individuals mentioned in this book who claim to
have witnessed the crash and/or subsequent recovery of an
extraterrestrial vehicle is telling the truth-then perhaps at this
very moment we sit at the verge of the greatest news story of
the twentieth century, the first contact with live (or dead)
extraterrestrials. This occurrence, if true, would be at least
comparable to Columbus’s encounter with the startled natives
on his visit to the New World. Except for one thing. In this
case we would be the startled natives.

9 The Russian Connection
From the dusty newspaper files of other decades we learn of a
tremendous and unexplained explosion of a meteor or comet
which crashed into the earth from the skies over Siberia in
1908; from the high Andean plateau of South America reports
come to us of a recent fireball that sheared off the top of a
mountain in 1979; in 1978 tremendous unidentified booms
were heard from over the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of New
Jersey and Virginia; shattering booms or explosions were also
referred to in news reports of the nineteenth century. The
NASA, AEC, FAC, NOAA, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy,
and other concerned agencies have all given explanations of
what the booms were not but failed to establish in each case
what they were. Nor have explanations for the following
phenomena been satisfactorily established: The Siberian, or
Tunguska, fireball, exploding spaceship, atomic blast, or
whatever it was left no trace of extraterrestrial or meteor core.
There remained only a flattened or burned part of the forest
(but no crater), a considerable number of dead reindeer, local
legends of a great explosion, and residual radiation which
lasted through the years.

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

In the past several years, however, rumors and a certain
amount of semiofficial documentation have been surfacing in
regard to another “visitor from space.” This one left some
concrete proof of its encounter with earth, during which the

UFO apparently suffered an explosion and subsequently struck
the earth before it recovered and was able to resume its path in
the sky. There exist certain similarities between this Russian
occurrence, which allegedly took place near Lake Onega in the
Karelean Associated Soviet Socialist Republic, U.S.S.R., and
the Roswell Incident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A close examination of the trenches along the escarpment and
the uprooted ground on the shore of the lake was conducted by
Major Kopeikin. This led to the recovery of a number of tiny,

black, metallic-looking, geometrically shaped particles of
apparently artificial origin, and one small piece of a thin,
metallic-looking foil-like (author’s emphasis) substance, one
millimeter thick, two centimeters long, and a half centimeter
wide, later found to be of the same composition as the black
particles. These, along with a number of samples of the bright
“chrome-green” colored ice and the black grains, were
collected and subsequently sent to the Leningrad
Technological Institute for analysis.

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

B. The geometrically shaped metallic-appearing particles were
found to be resistant to acid and high temperatures, were not
radioactive, and seemed to consist of a silicon-iron alloy in
combination with lesser amounts of aluminum, lithium,
titanium, and sodium.

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

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

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

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

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

“Tt 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 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 theJansen Crater is described as being
of “improbable height” with the added suggestion that it might
be a gigantic electric pylon.

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

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

If we adopt, however, the logical supposition that we are not
alone in our galaxy it is not too much an additional step of the

imagination to speculate on the possibility of the use of the
moon by unspecified others as a base from which to observe
our earth. The dark side of the moon presents several
outstanding advantages to this end. It is shielded from radio
interference from earth, it has no climactic difficulties or
corrosion problems, and, as the largest moon in the solar
system relative to the size of its planet - almost a sister planet
to the earth - it is conveniently near the developed planetary
life existing on earth.

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

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

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

The danger of continued UFO secrecy, now being tested in the
courts of the United States, is fairly obvious. Individual UFO
malfunction resulting in large explosions or retaliatory attacks
by UFOs could easily be attributed to potential enemy action
(since UFOs do not officially exist) and set off chain reactions

leading to the use of nuclear warheads among the increasing
number of nations possessing these weapons. The nations of
the earth owe it to themselves and each other to share
information received on UFOs over the skies of earth as well
as evidence of unidentified nonearthly activities in space.

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

but hard-to-establish quality of UFOs and their inference about
extraterrestrial life: “It is as impossible to confirm them in the
present as it will be to deny them in the future.”

Let us hope that as our present becomes our uncertain future
we will be ready to accept them in understanding and goodwill
and, at the same time, with the necessary technical
preparation, on earth as well as in space.

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

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

Many motives have been ascribed to the senders or occupants
of UFOs, mostly concerned with attack, exploitation,
reconnaissance for conquest, capture of human specimens, or
planned future occupation of the earth, all of which mirror our
own images of how we would react in their place. But,
possibly because of the danger we represent to ourselves and

our surroundings, there may be another explanation. Perhaps
what we call UFOs are part of a design - or message - whose
meaning may become clear to us, one hopes, while there is
still time.

FOOTNOTES
[1]. After duly noting the general’s strong hint, Major Marcel
returned to Roswell immediately and maintained a
commendable silence for years thereafter.

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

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

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