Why the Roswell Press Release

 

I’m going to have to stop looking at the Internet because there is always something there that pisses me off. The latest was a video about five conspiracies that can be destroyed by asking a single question. Naturally, I clicked on it because I was sure that Roswell would show up. It was the fourth of five. I was surprised by the question that supposedly unravels the Roswell conspiracy.

That question was, “Why did the 509^th Bomb Group issue the press release saying that they had captured a flying saucer in the Roswell region?”

It is fine question but one that I have answered several times. The answer is predicated on the timing of the question, meaning that the press release was issued on July 8, 1947, only two weeks after the phenomenon had exploded in the newspapers. Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine strange craft flying in formation was the cause of the interest and the inspiration for the term flying saucer. In those days that followed, there were hundreds of reports of flying saucers. There were almost as many explanations for what they were as there were newspapers and military theories. The idea of an interplanetary craft was one of those but that explanation was not at the top of the list.

Ed Ruppelt, who took over as the chief of Project Grudge which evolved into Project Blue Book said that the Pentagon was in a panic over the reports. There was a certain hysteria about the flying saucers. It was because no one knew what was going on. Army Air Forces fighters had intercepted UFOs, and the UFOs had paced commercial aircraft, not to mention cars on the ground. Part of the hysteria was fed by those inventing their tales of close encounters suggesting an alien invasion. No one knew what was going on.

When Jess Marcel, Sr. returned to the Roswell Army Air Field with a carload of strange metallic debris, no one knew what it was. According to the officers I interviewed who were there at the time and would have been in a position to know what was going on, were aware of the hysteria. After all, World War II had been over for less than two years, the Soviets were throwing up an Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe that suggested that a new war was on the horizon and now there were tales of strange craft flying around the US unimpeded.  

Randle on the Debris Field in the early 1990s.

The debris recovered by Marcel suggested that the flying saucers might not be hostile or threatening. Blanchard’s thoughts were to announce they had a flying saucer, though it was only bits and pieces of one, but it was enough that they could relieve some of that hysteria. His thoughts were to remove that one aspect from the public consciousness. According to the officers I talked to, including Walter Haut, Colonel Butch Blanchard felt an obligation to report what they had found.

Walter Haut, the man who wrote the press release at his home in Roswell.
Photo by Kevin randle

It was only after the debris had been examined carefully that they realized that whatever it was, it represented a technology that surpassed that of the United States. The metal that was extremely light weight but super strong, what we now suspect was fiber optics which had yet to be invented and, of course, the thin metal that when wadded up returned to its original shape.

But the real turning point came after the press release was, well, released. That was when the rest of the craft was discovered much closer to Roswell than the debris field 65 miles away near Corona. It was here that the bodies were recovered. That changed the dynamic. That told those in charge, meaning the civilian and military leadership in Washington that what was recovered was something so extraordinary that they created the cover up to give them time to determine just what was going on. Were the flying saucers hostile? Benign? What would it mean to our civilization?

The events in Roswell were isolated because Roswell was in the middle of the desert and the military could control all the information coming out of the town. They shifted the story to Fort Worth and Brigadier General Roger Ramey. He was able to put out the fire with the display of a weather balloon and a rawin target. The tale died at that point and the press moved onto other stories.

But the answer to the question about the press release is simple. When Blanchard ordered the press release, all they had was the strange metallic debris, which was just strange metallic debris. He thought to end some of the hysteria by telling the public that they had found a flying saucer. It was nothing to worry about. Blanchard, as the commanding officer at the Roswell Army Air Field, had the authority to provide the press with information that he believed was important. He had not seen the true value of the find until the craft and bodies were located but believed it was his duty to suggest that they had the situation under control. They had a flying saucer and it was nothing to worry about.

The trouble was, he issued the press release prematurely. Had he waited twenty-four hours, it is unlikely we would have ever heard about the crash. It was a tactical mistake but not a strategic one. The situation was altered within three hours of the press release hitting the national wires. But the point here is that I know why he issued the press release based on my discussions with some of the senior officers on the base in 1947. Forty-five years after the event, they provided an answer, but the skeptical community is now hung up on Project Mogul, just one more evidence of how important the find was.

Now, can we put that question into a footnote where it belongs and get onto the more important aspects of the case?

John Greenewald, Christopher Mellon and Kingman

As those of you who visit here regularly know, I believe the tale of a UFO crash near Kingman, Arizona in 1953, is a fake. It boiled down to a single identified eyewitness, who said that he embellished his stories when he had been drinking. It seems to be a tale that an adult fed to two teenagers, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. I would guess that he thought the story would go no farther than the two young men. The trouble is that Arthur Stansel’s story spread into the public arena and Ray Fowler got involved. He wrote an article for Official UFO’s April 1976 issue. Kingman entered the big time.

I’m not going to recap all that now. I’ve written extensively about it and included a long chapter about it in my upcoming book on UFOs. In the book, there are details that suggest a hoax. But then, Christopher Mellon released screen shots of an email in which Kingman is mentioned. I have thought that Mellon was one of the correspondents but it turns out that he had received a copy of the email from someone else, a person he refused to identify.

My point has always been that if Mellon was on the inside, as he had suggested in the past, he should have known the truth about Kingman. He would have known about the newspaper articles from the 1950s found by David Rudiak that mention all sorts of strange things going on in that Arizona but all of which seem to be more fantasy than fact. My thought has been that anyone who had access to government files would know the truth. This was developing into another MJ-12 fiasco.

David Rudiak at the Roswell Festival.
Photo by Kevin Randle

By that I mean the release of the MJ-12 documents sparked a government and Air Force investigation of the MJ-12 documents. Their conclusion was that the documents were bogus. I had thought them authentic when first published, but my investigation, based in part on my experience as an Air Force Intelligence Officer, suggested a hoax. I detailed all that in the updated version of my book, Case MJ-12.

I mention all this because John Greenewald just published on his The Black Vault website, the results of his FOIA requests for more information about this.

You can access the whole article at:

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/inside-the-pentagons-review-of-christopher-mellons-alleged-ufo-crash-retrieval-text/

 What I learn from that is that Mellon was able to publish the redacted email because it wasn’t classified. John wrote:

The FOIA file begins with Mellon’s January 19, 2024, email to DOPSR, in which he submitted the text message screenshot he later published publicly. Mellon wrote that he was seeking confirmation “to confirm it is not classified,” and noted that a submission mailed earlier had been returned “because some employee deemed it a security threat.”

The email does suggest there might be a classified portion because the email said, “We also know that a still highly classified memo by a Secretary of the USAF in the 1950s is still in effect to maintain the cover of UAPs.”

John Greenewald in Denver.
Photo by Kevin Randle

I will note here, that I am bothered by the use of the term UAP. That is fairly new term and Mellon, in his attempt to learn if there was anything classified in the email, wrote:

In that letter, Mellon explained that the message was sent to him “some years ago” by a former DoD employee alleging they were “being read into a program involving the exploitation of recovered off-world technology”. Mellon also indicated he had “redacted the name of the alleged ‘gatekeeper’” and emphasized that he respected the confidentiality of the source.

Of course, without knowing when the email was sent and the only date on the document was when it was cleared for publication, we might be dealing with an anachronism. We just don’t know what “some years ago” means in terms of when Mellon received it. There is a suggestion that the email was from 2020, which is after the term UAP was invented, but that is just a guess.

In his posting to his website, John provided additional detail that I believe weakens this alleged “leak.” He wrote:

The approval stamp, dated March 1, 2024, appears on the version later published by Mellon in April 2024, when Mellon published the message and an accompanying explanation. In it, he emphasized that he received the text years earlier from “a senior government official” who he said “had plausible access and was high-ranking,” and whose claim of access to a crash retrieval program was why he believed at least some allegations merited attention.

He also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.

So, what do we have here? We have an email from an unidentified source referencing a case that is a hoax but suggests it is real. We learn there is a highly classified program, but we don’t have the name of that program. And we have the suggestion that the writer was denied access to the program and saw nothing himself. We have no way to vet the information in the email, which makes it virtually useless.

As for the idea that there might be something to the email, John quoted “The records also reveal that Mellon’s first attempt to submit the material was returned to him after a DOPSR employee deemed his three-page mailed package a ‘security threat’ a detail he did not disclose in his public article.” I would suggest that whoever initially received the request noted the reference to that highly-classified program. That would have been enough for him or her to flag it for further review.

I believe the most telling of the sentences in the letter is one that bears repeating. It said, “He also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.”

In the end, this becomes another rabbit hole that leads us to a dead end. Unless we are given some way to vet the information in that email it is just rumor. I say that someone used the Kingman case because he or she thought it was a real event. In the end, you might say that was the poison pill.

I do applaud John for providing us with additional information about this aspect of the Kingman case. It just doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t been before.

 

For those who wish to follow up on all this and who might not be completely aware of all the data available, I suggest the following:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Kingman#google_vignette 

John Stossel, Wikipedia and Project Mogul

 While looking for YouTube videos to entertain me as I ate breakfast, I found John Stossel’s analysis of Wikipedia’s bias. He, of course, focused more on the political arena than in that of the paranormal, but that got me thinking, “What is their analysis of the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell UFO crash.”

You can watch the Stossel video that started this whole thing here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+stossel+wikipedia

The very first thing I noticed in the Wikipedia entry, under a heading of “Roswell Incident,” was the opening sentence. “In 1947, a Project Mogul balloon NYU Flight 4, launched June 4, crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.”

The problem with that sentence is that it ignores the field notes and later diary entries written by Dr. Albert Crary, who as the project leader. Those documents eliminate a balloon launch on June 4. Dr. Crary wrote, “June 4 Wed. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds [emphasis added].” For some reason, those of the skeptical bias seem to ignore that statement, inventing alternative meanings behind it. I believe it is destructive to the Mogul explanation because, there was no launch of a full array on June 4.

Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the
balloon flights in 1947.

In the chart of what was the New York University balloon project launches, we see there was no data collected for Flight #4. In fact, it’s not even listed as a flight because it was canceled. Flight #5, which flew the next day, has the notation “First successful flight carrying a heavy load.”

Charles Moore, one of the engineers on the project, told me, that Flight #4 was as successful as Flight #5. This is an obvious contradiction to the documentation that is available because, if it had collected data, it would be listed.

To be fair, because I think of this as an investigation and not a debate, I note that, according to Crary’s notes, “Flew a regular sono buoy up in a cluster of balloons and had good luck with receiver on the ground but poor on the plane.”

But the next entry, for June 5, clarifies the situation. Crary wrote, “Up at 4 to shoot two charges for balloon flight. Whole assembly of constant altitude balloons set up at 0500.” That suggests that the cluster of balloons was not a full assembly, contrary to Moore’s claim that there was a Flight #4 and it was as successful as Flight #5.

The New York Times endorsed the idea that there was something extremely unusual about the Mogul arrays. According to that story, “"...squadrons of big balloons ... It was like having an elephant in your backyard and hoping that no one would notice it. ... To the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil. ... photographs of it, taken in 1947 and published in newspapers, show bits and pieces of what are obviously collapsed balloons and radar reflectors.”

First, there weren’t squadrons of big balloons but an array of standard weather balloons, recognizable, even when arranged in a long array. There was nothing about the balloons that would render them unrecognizable.

Second, according to what Charles Moore told me, the mythical Flight #4 was configured exactly like Flight #5. The problem then is that the schematic for Flight #5 contains no rawin targets, which The New York Times described as “the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil.”

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I supplied to him.
Photo by Kevin Randle

Third, the photographs published in the newspapers in 1947 do, in fact, show a rawin radar target, but both Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., and Colonel Thomas Dubose, who are in the pictures, have testified that the material in the pictures was not the material recovered in Roswell. Both said that the real material was switched with that of the weather balloon and radar reflector.

Fourth, I don’t know who those untrained eyes belonged to. The balloon and rawin targets were used by the thousands during the invasion of Okinawa for example, and were later used during the Bikini atom tests. The 509^th and Jess Marcel participated in those tests at Bikini. There simply wasn’t anything that unusual about the balloons and radar reflectors which had been launched by the thousands for weather gathering purposes. They were easily recognizable to the officers of the 509^th, because their weather office used them.

Major Jesse Marcel with part of a damaged
radar reflector. Marcel was later quoted as
saying that this wasn't what he had found
in New Mexico.

One of the facts that is never discussed by the skeptical side of the argument is that Mack Brazel, the rancher who took the samples to the Chaves County Sheriff, George Wilcox, knew what weather balloons looked like. Brazel was concerned by the size of the debris field and wanted to know who as going to clear up the mess.

The second problem is that Flight #4 was allegedly launched on June 4, but Brazel didn’t take samples of the debris to the sheriff until a month later. Descriptions of the debris scattered in the pasture suggest that it was so thick that the sheep refused to cross the field for water. According to Bill Brazel, son of Mack, and Tommy Tyree, a sometimes ranch hand, Mack was in the field at least every other day, meaning that he would have found it on June 5 or 6, if we believe the newspapers story. Given the location of the debris and the water source, Brazel would have reported it with in a day or two. He wanted those responsible for scattering the debris to clean it up. This tidbit of information is just another reason to reject the Mogul explanation.

All this is to provide some perspective for my suggestion that Wikipedia’s bias is showing. Every source cited in the footnotes is from a skeptical publication or a writer with a skeptical point of view. Looking at some of the source material used, I can point to repeated errors. Donovan Webster provides us with many examples of this from suggesting the Mac [sic] Brazel was 80 miles from Roswell to reporting, “Seeking answers, he contacted Colonel “Butch” Blanchard, commander of the Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th Composite Group, located just outside of town. Blanchard was stymied. Working his way up the chain of command, he decided to contact his superior, General Roger W. Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas.”

Although it is unclear who the “he” is, the information was relayed to Jesse Marcel and not Colonel William Butch Blanchard. It was Marcel who was stymied and accompanied Brazel back to the ranch with Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Counterintelligence Corps. They traveled out to the ranch. Marcel was not accompanied by Sheriff Wilcox.

Webster also wrote, “On June 21, Navy Seaman Harold Dahl claimed to have seen six unidentified flying objects in the sky near Maury Island in Washington state’s Puget Sound. The next morning, Dahl said he was sought out and debriefed by ‘men in black.’”

I’m not sure why Webster brought this in because it has nothing to do with the Roswell case and it is filled with more inaccuracies than his Roswell information. Harold Dahl was not a Navy seaman but operated a salvage boat. His report was called the dirtiest hoax in UFO history by Captain Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book.

But I digress.

And Webster also wrote, “By early July 1947, Brazel had heard tales of flying saucers in the Pacific Northwest. These sightings spurred him to show his discovery to the authorities, but just one day after the Air Force announced it had come into possession of a flying saucer, Roswell’s morning newspaper debunked the story.”

Except Brazel lived in isolation on the ranch without radio or electricity. He hadn’t heard about the flying saucers and was not “spurred” to show his discovery to authorities by those stories. He was spurred to take samples of the debris to Roswell because he wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess in one of the pastures. His son, Bill Brazel told me that. Brazel’s neighbors and Tommy Tyree also said that.

Bill Brazel (on the left) with Don Schmitt on the debris field near Corona, NM.
Photo by Kevin Randle

The point here is that the story by Webster was not very accurate and I have to wonder why the Smithsonian Magazine, which printed it, didn’t bother to fact check it.

It is also clear that one of Webster’s sources was the July 9, 1947, story in the Roswell Daily Record, “Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He told about it.” I mention this because a big deal is made about rubber sticks, tinfoil and rough paper descriptions that suggest a weather balloon. But according to the newspaper, “Brazel said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not resemble either of these.”

Brazel is quoted as saying “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Except, of course, had it been a Mogul balloon, it would have resemble those because that phantom flight was made up of off the shelf weather balloons and although it was claimed that there had been radar targets with it, according to the records and Charles Moore, there had been no radar targets on that flight.

Once again, I’m dragged away from the point and that is the bias of Wikipedia. Other sources include Kendrick Frazier, one of the leaders of a large skeptical society once known as CSICOP but later as CSI; Lieutenant James McAndrew of the Air Force team that investigated Roswell in the mid-1990s; Kathryn S. Olmsted, who reinforces the Air Force position and William J. Broad of The New York Times who has published skeptical articles about UFOs and Roswell on multiple occasions.

I must wonder why there is nothing from any of us who had interviewed the witnesses in Roswell, done the research in various archives and newspaper files, and have a different point of view. James McAndrew called me on several occasions, attempting to get me to tell him that I was only in it for the money. He refused to listen to testimony that I had gathered, listen to the tapes of those interviews with officers like Major Edwin Easley who suggested that following the extraterrestrial was not the wrong path, or those who had seen the bodies.

It is not necessary to believe that what fell at Roswell was an alien craft, but because there is controversy about it and a large body of eyewitness testimony available on both audio and video tape, not to mention documentation that eliminates Project Mogul as the culprit, you would think that the counter arguments would be addressed. I could point to a several errors in the works cited (and to be fair, there are mistakes on the other side as well), but in the interest of accuracy, shouldn’t those arguments be referenced? Doesn’t Wikipedia have an obligation to get it right?

John Stossel was so put off by the bias displayed in Wikipedia’s unreliable sources for political stories, he decided he wasn’t going to donate to them again. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would suggest that Wikipedia provide a comprehensive report on Project Mogul rather than parroting the words of the Air Force on this… And I didn’t even mention the anthropomorphic dummies dropped in the area some ten years after the crash used to explain the descriptions of alien bodies reported in 1947.

In this case, I’m not arguing that the Roswell crash was alien, but that the comprehensive information gathered from those who were on the scene in 1947 were simply ignored. For a detailed analysis of the Mogul explanation, may I suggest Roswell in the 21^st Century. It contains a great deal of information not mentioned here including footnotes on the sources.

(Author’s Note: This was supposed to be much shorter but I wanted to make the point that this particular entry was biased and does not provide an accurate picture of what happened at Roswell.)

Age of Disclosure: A Personal Review

 Yes, I have seen Dan Farah’s Age of Disclosure, and this will be one of those mixed reviews. There are some good things in it and some clunkers in it. The documentary began with the introductions of some high-level people, or I suppose I should say, some formerly high-level people. This segment is important because it suggests inside information and the possible disclosure of important photographs and video footage. It suggests there is evidence of alien visitation that we haven’t seen and each of these men hint they have seen the truth with their own eyes… well, some of them can only tell us what they derived from second-hand sources, though Jay Stratton makes the claim he has seen the craft and the bodies with his own eyes. Impressive stuff.

As we move on, we are told by those sources that:

“Humans are not the only intelligence in the universe.”

“They’re real, they’re here, and they’re not human.”

“Non-human intelligences are here and have been interacting with humanity for a long time.”

“We are not the only intelligent life form on the planet. There’s something else here.”

“This is the biggest discovery in human history.” 

On that last point, Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I have been saying for decades this story is the biggest in the last thousand years. There is nothing to compare to it but then, I’m not sure it is the biggest discovery in human history, though if pressed, I could only think of one thing and that takes us into the realm of religion and frankly I don’t want to go there in this review.

I have heard for months about this film changing the landscape of UFO, well, UAP research, and that opening sequence gave me hope. To me, it promised to provide some of that evidence that has been kept from us for decades.

Hal Puthoff tells us, “The classified data that we had access to when we joined the program was indisputable.” That’s good for him, but we must know what those classified data are because we haven’t seen them. We have been promised that data and disclosure for decades but somehow it never happens.

Eric Davis then tells us, “There is 80 years of data that the public isn’t even aware of.”

But I find Eric Davis somewhat problematic. He had said on a few occasions that the Del Rio crash is real. I have spent a great deal of time and effort in my research on this alleged crash and discovered the original tale was told by former Air Force colonel, Robert Willingham. Len Stringfield, whose research changed most of our opinions on stories of crash/retrievals, a term he invented, provided some early analysis of that crash. I even found in Skylook, the original magazine published by MUFON, Willingham’s original story. It is remarkedly different from that he told to others. But let’s ignore all that. Willingham was never an Air Force fighter pilot as he claimed, was not an Air Force colonel as he suggested, had never even served in the Air Force but had been a member of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). He wore ribbons he had never earned, claimed he had been wounded in the Korean War, but his military record showed only thirteen months of military service from December 1945 to January 1947. He is not a reliable source.

I mention all this because, if Eric Davis had inside information, he would have known that the Del Rio crash was the invention of Robert Willingham. It never happened, but it excited many in the UFO community including me until I saw his military record and pictures of him in a CAP uniform attempting to convince us he had been a high-ranking Air Force officer.

Robert Willingham in his CAP uniform. You can see the
 "CAP" insignia on the collar and the metal plate
showing it is the CAP.

We are treated to Jay Stratton, who tells us, “The things that I’ve seen, the clearest videos, the best evidence we have that these are non-human intelligence, remains classified. I have seen with my own eyes non-human craft and non-human beings.”

He had been featured in some of the trailers about the documentary and I reported on Coast-to-Coast AM his statement about seeing the evidence with his own eyes. I was cautiously optimistic about Stratton’s testimony, but wanted to wait until I saw the documentary. I had expected greater things from Stratton. Do we get any sort of evidence from him in the form of documents and photographs? No. Just his serious claim that he had seen it with his own eyes but we don’t get to see it with ours.

I think here of the officers and enlisted men in Roswell in July 1947. I talked to many of them, as did Don and Tom. They told us what they had seen with their own eyes. Thomas Gonzales, a sergeant with the 509^th made carvings of the alien creatures he had seen. Does that prove he saw aliens? Frankly, no. But at least we had something more than a claim to have seen these things. Gonzales surfaced, literally decades ago, just as the Roswell crash was entering the public consciousness.

Thomas Gonzales cravings of the little men.

Christopher Mellon is featured throughout the film. He talked about his experiences, but I worry about him as well. He released an email, heavily redacted, earlier this year. It mentioned the Kingman UFO crash of 1953, suggesting it was real. But like Del Rio, there is but a single eyewitness to that crash retrieval, Arthur Stansel. The trouble is Stansel told Ray Fowler, who interviewed him in 1973, that when he drank, he tended to embellish his stories. When he told Jeff Young and Paul Chetham, the first to interview him about the crash, he’d had four martinis. I have published a long analysis of the Kingman crash that can be found here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2025/06/chasing-footnotes-sort-of-kingman.html

And like Eric Davis, if Mellon was on the inside, he should have been aware of the trouble with the case. I suppose this is just part of the massive disinformation campaign that we keep hearing about as the excuse for the failure to provide the evidence. Instead, it’s let’s smear these guys so that no one will believe them. But there is a point where that excuse collapses and that point has been reached. I do not find the claims of Kingman to be legitimate, though I do note that Kingman was not mentioned in the documentary.

The email that mentions the Kingman crash.

They also mentioned that the President is kept out of the loop. The President, his cabinet and the top level of bureaucrats serve for short periods. They are replaced by elections but those hired to work under them can serve for decades. This is where the real power lies and there is evidence of this happening.

For decades the FBI office in New York ran Operation Solo. Morris Childs, who had once been a devout communist flipped and became a spy for the FBI. His contributions to our intelligence community were known to the very few who were read into. Even the President was left out unless it became necessary to brief him. John Barron wrote a book about Operation Solo and Morris Childs after Childs had retired from his spy work. It does prove that sometimes there are intelligence programs that as so sensitive that even the President is left out.

I did cover how this could work with the UFO programs, such as the claimed Legacy Program. The President is not briefed on it because there is no reason to do so. If he asks questions, the answers simply are not provided in a timely manner. I did examine this in UFOs and the Deep State, providing sources for that information.

This is becoming longer than I expected, so I’ll just tackle one other aspect of all this. A question that has been asked repeatedly is “If these aliens are as advanced as you claim, why do they keep crashing?” I have written two books on that topic, the latest being Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. The first part of that answer is that they don’t keep crashing. Of the more than one hundred crashes listed in the book, there are fewer than five that can be considered real and two of those are problematic. Roswell is, of course, the top of the crash/retrieval list.

However, many years ago, I suggested that aliens had crashed the UFO on purpose. I said it was a benign way of introducing themselves in a non-threatening way. We recover the craft and the bodies and see the aliens as fallible. They aren’t the threat that we see in the science fiction movies where their technology is so far superior to ours that as Arthur C. Clark has said, it looks like magic.

I didn’t suggest that they actually killed members of the crew but provided us with biological samples that looked humanoid that hadn’t survived the crash. It would give us a chance to get use to the idea that there are creatures from another world. It was just a wild idea that I thought was interesting but I certainly didn’t believe it. Here they seem to have recycled that idea claiming it was a way to share some of their technology with us, if we were smart enough to figure it out.

I suppose my overall point is that there was nothing new in the documentary, some of the information was inaccurate, and part of it seemed to be derived from the work that Don, Tom and I have done. Other parts were derived from the work of Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield. We’re told that there were four bodies recovered in the Roswell crash, but we’ve heard that for decades from multiple sources. We’re told there were two crash sites but already we knew that and we’ve been to both.  Lue Elizondo mentioned all this as if it was some sort of new revelation. The information is at least thirty years old and has been published multiple times. It would have been impressive if he could have told us something new or even added a few new details.

 Don (on right) and me on the impact site where the
main part of the craft and bodies were found.

He did mention that the craft and bodies had been flown to Wright Field, later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but we already knew that. In fact, Brigadier General Arthur Exon told us, in the 1990s, that one of the bodies had been sent on to Denver where the Army had a mortuary service. The goal was to find a way to preserve the unique biological samples. Exon had been at Wright Field when the craft and bodies arrived, which put him in the middle of that episode.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon.

End the end, there were no great revelations by the insiders. There was no evidence, other than the testimony of those claiming to be on the inside. There were no pictures, no videos that we haven’t seen, and nothing of substance on which to hang a logical conclusion. Yes, the tales told by the fighter pilots were interesting but the videos were nothing new. We had seen them years ago. The Navy told us the videos were real, meaning they were shot from the Navy fighters, but they weren’t telling us that the videos showed alien craft.

We knew some of it was accurate because we, on the outside had found it. We knew some of the witnesses were telling us what they believed to be the truth, but we couldn’t get to the last step which was the release of the classified information. We knew that some information had been classified because we had samples of the documents marked with classification stamps and we were told that there were hidden files and testimony that we could not access.

The Age of Disclosure didn’t take us anywhere that we, on the outside, hadn’t already been. It was a lot of talk and extraordinary claims but no evidence to back it up other than the testimony of those supposedly on the inside. Given the statements of some of these witnesses, made in the past, I worried about their insider status and what they claimed to know. Frankly, the documentary was a disappointment because it didn’t have the evidence to back up the hyperbole. Watch it if you must, but remember, there wasn’t much new in it and no real proof was offered to bolster the claims. Lots of smoke but no fire.

The Kingman Crash and the Mystery Letter

 

Kingman, Arizona in the late 1990s.

As those who visit here regularly know, I sometimes chase footnotes to the original source and sometime I chase other information to a primary source. In the last several weeks, as I worked on a new UFO book, I was engaged in communications with others about the Kingman crash. This was not about Arthur Stansel, the man who started the story after his interview with two teenagers, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham, and then with Ray Fowler, but follow on information and alleged additional witnesses.

This has to do with the tales told by Judie Woolcott who claimed that her late husband, an Army officer killed in Vietnam in 1965, had written to her and told her about his involvement in the crash. She said that he had been in a control tower in northwestern Arizona when the object hit the ground. He, along with several others, drove out, in the direction of a bright flash that interested them, finally finding it. They were chased from the site by military police after being warned not to talk about what they had seen.

I received a telephone call and later an email from Kathryn Baez, who was Woolcott’s daughter. She wrote, “My Step Father, William Woolcott, served in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam, however, they were never considered Vietnam Veterans.”

I’m not sure why they weren’t considered Vietnam Veterans if they served off the coast of Vietnam, but that’s another problem. According to the email, dated June 1, 2010, she wrote, “He is very much alive and living in Wausau.”

She added that her mother didn’t know Woolcott until 1980. Both those facts seemed to rule him out as the source of the extraordinary information provided by Judie about the Kingman crash.

As I have mentioned in older posts, David Rudiak and I, had been chasing down some of this information over the summer. David came up with another name and an explanation why Judie Woolcott might have lied about who sent the letter to her from Vietnam.

David found a website hosted by someone who called himself, “The Wanderling,” who might have identified the real source of that mythical letter. According The Wanderling, he said the man who sent the letters wasn’t married to Woolcott, but was a soldier and close friend who was killed in Vietnam in 1965.

David thought the man, an Army captain whose name might have been Charles Alan Roberts, and who was killed in Vietnam in 1965, might have been the author the letter. David’s research did put the man in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and confirmed that he had been killed in action.

But there was a complication to this speculation. According to his military record, which I discovered online a couple of weeks ago, he had been in the Army but was discharged in December 1952. From 1953 to 1955, he was attending New Mexico A&M which became New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The record puts him nowhere near an air control tower in Kingman in 1953 and rules him out as the writer of the letter that Woolcott never produced.

Woolcott supposedly lied about him being her husband because they had a thing going on and she didn’t want the family to learn about it. The alleged letter was not released by Woolcott because of that personal information. She was hiding it from her then current husband or her family or maybe the government because of those personal comments. It is just one more claim of corroboration that seems to have vanished into the mists of time.

Oh, there is one other thing that Baez mentioned in an email dated June 7, 2010. Her mother, Judie, was a teenager in 1953 and in school. It seems unlikely that she would have developed a relationship with a man who had been in the Army in 1952 and later college.

I’ll mention again, that there is now a single first-hand witness to the Kingman crash, the wholly (I nearly wrote holy) unreliable Arthur Stansel.

The Mellon email that started this hunt.

Yes, I realize that this will not drive the stake through the heart of the Kingman case, but the recent support provided by Christopher Mellon, makes you wonder about his insider status. There simply are no reliable witnesses to any Kingman crash… which, I suppose I should note means that I haven’t found any but they might be out there, lurking somewhere. Unless or until they surface, the only logical conclusion is the case is a hoax originally created by Arthur Stansel as he chatted with the boys back in 1973 and drank a bunch of martinis.

The New Jesse Marcel Interview

Periodically, I’m asked if there is anything new to be found about the Roswell crash. I believe that all the first-hand witnesses to those events in July 1947 have died. The last first-hand witness I interviewed was Stanley Muelling on January 18, 2012 when he was 87 years old.

He made it clear that he had been told to never talk about what he had seen. He said, “If I did, I already forgot about it. I’m supposed to forget.”

At that point, meaning in 2012, we realized that there were very few left who would have been in Roswell at the right time. Although today Muelling would be 100, it is certainly possible for him to still be alive, but I know of no one still alive who could provide a first-hand account that would add to our basic knowledge of the case.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other means of gathering first-hand testimony. Just this week, we learned from David Marler at the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque that Lee Speigel had interviewed Jesse Marcel, Sr. about Roswell in the early 1980s. That interview was recorded and is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC3Ln3-tyds

He asked Marcel about the beginnings of the tale and Marcel provided us the details of how he learned about the crash site and his meeting with Mack Brazel. Marcel gathered Sheridan Cavitt to follow Brazel back to the ranch. This is slightly interesting because Bessie Brazel Schreiber who had talked about accompanying her father into Roswell to report what he had found isn’t mentioned. Bill Brazel has disputed Bessie’s claim and here is Marcel, talking about following Brazel to the ranch, stopping at what he called a shack where the ate beans and rice but no mention of Bessie Brazel being there. That takes her out of the picture and her claims that it was a huge balloon, are negated. I mention this so we don’t get bogged down in a discussion about her role in this and point out that she later repudiated her claim that she was there.

The Debris Field. Brazel took Don Schmitt and me to the top
of the rise and pointed down. You can see that a gouge
should have been visible to Marcel.

And listening to this, I think that Marcel has gotten the timeline wrong. He told Speigel, “And by the time I got back home, my wife, is what happened to you? There’s been a bunch of news reporters out here wanting a picture of you and I said, ‘For what.’’’

There would have been no reporters interested in Jesse Marcel on July 7 when he returned from the debris field. The only people who knew what had been found were Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt. Naturally, when Cavitt returned, he would have notified his superior in Albuquerque since Cavitt’s chain of command was different than Marcel’s. It is probable that Cavitt, out of courtesy, would have told Blanchard, but there was no requirement for that. Cavitt might just have waited for Marcel to return to tell Blanchard about the crash.

The point is, that the press release wasn’t issued until the afternoon of July 8, at which time the reporters would have learned about Marcel. At that point they certainly could have arrived at his house to ask questions. Marcel was in Fort Worth at the time and wouldn’t return until July 9.

Major Jesse Marcel with the balloon debris in 
General Ramey's office in Fort Worth.

   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

In this interview, Marcel reconfirms the size of the debris field being ¾ of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. He suggested there was quite a bit of metallic debris. He talked about filling the jeep carry all with debris and that he, Marcel, filled his Buick as well. He said there was quite a lot of it left behind. The real point here is that a Mogul array, would not have filled the jeep carry all. And, since it is clear from the testimony of Charles Moore, an engineer with the balloon project in Alamogordo, that Flight #4, the culprit in this, did not have rawin targets. The remains of the balloon array would have fit into the Marcel’s car trunk. These facts rule out Mogul.

Marcel said that he sent Cavitt back to the base with a truckload of debris and that he, Marcel, stayed on quite a bit. He then drove home, arriving about eight that evening.

There is one point that I’m sure the skeptics will seize on, if they are paying attention. Asked about when he was getting curious about flying saucers, Marcel said:

On thing I wanted to explore, I wanted to find out if it was an object that hit the ground. And obviously it was not because no scar on the ground anywhere. Something obviously exploded in the air and fragments scattered all over the place… Well, this is what happened. I scoured the ground. I looked all over the place to see if I could see any scare one the ground, if something had fallen our of the sky and hit the ground. But that was not in evidence at all. It was obviously something that exploded while in flight and scattered fragments on the ground as it traveled.

This is in direct conflict with what Bill Brazel told both Don Schmitt and me, as we stood on the debris field. Brazel said it was about five hundred yards long and about ten feet wide at its widest. He said that it took about two years before is was completely grassed over.

Bill Brazel on the Debris Field with Don Schmitt.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

We also interviewed Bud Payne a retired judge who escorted us to the debris field in the early 1990s. Payne pointed to the same areas as had Bill Brazel, telling us about a gouge in the ground.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who flew over the area in the months that followed mentioned two crash sites. He was referring to the debris field near Corona, and another site closer to Roswell. He mentioned seeing vehicle tracks in the area and a gouge, confirming what Brazel had told others several months earlier.

This is something of a conundrum. According to Brazel, the gouge was obvious, but Marcel doesn’t mention it. He talks about the size of the debris field and says the object exploded in the air. Don, Tom Carey and I have all stood on the raised ground at the beginning of the debris field and from that vantage point, we can see to the point that Brazel indicated was the end of the gouge. I have no idea why Marcel said that he didn’t see it.

There are many other gems in the Speigel interview. He asked Marcel about any personal UFO sightings. Marcel talked about seeing a strange formation of lights prior to the events of July 1947. According to Marcel, he had been called by the provost marshal and told to hurry out to the base. Marcel told Speigel, that this was something that he had never mentioned to anyone.

Marcel said, “And while going out there as fast as my car could run, I saw some lights in the sky, but it was a defined formation. It is a perfect “V” formation.”

He said that the formation was visible from overhead to the horizon, and suggested the formation was moving faster than any aircraft in the military inventory of 1947.

He did mention it to Major Edwin Easley who was the provost marshal at the time. Easley said that some of the boys over here saw that too.

Marcel said, “What it was, I still don’t know.”

One of the other criticisms of the Marcel testimony was his suggestion that he didn’t know what it was but he was sure that while it came to Earth, it was not from Earth. Skeptics wondered how he made this leap because, in 1947, there were tales of spaceships in the Buck Rogers’ comic strip and Flash Gordon was battling Ming the Merciless, but no real suggestion of alien visitation.

An interesting point, but Brazel’s arrival in Roswell was about two weeks after Kenneth Arnold made his sighting. Newspapers of the time were filled with stories about other flying saucer reports, not to mention the Foo Fighters of World War II and the Ghost Rockets seen over Scandinavia in 1946. Marcel, as the intelligence officer would have been aware of all these things so that when he was confronted with metallic debris that was so foreign to him, he recognized none of it and when he saw the size of the debris field, the conclusion that it was something off world wasn’t that radical. Speculations in the newspapers of the time ran the gambit from spots before the eyes, war hysteria, outright hoxes to creatures from Mars and Venus. Marcel didn’t grab the idea out of thin air; it was floating right there in front of him

There are additional questions that need answers in this newly retrieved interview. There are other points that seem to be contradictory. All this must be examined with an unbiased and dispassionate eye. And we need to put it into the context of the time, remembering that some memories fade and others are modified when new information is encountered. Sometimes the witnesses don’t lie, but are telling the truth as they remember it. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes they just want their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

If Marcel was a stand-alone witness on the Roswell crash, we would be right rejecting all that he says as delusion or confabulation. But every member of Colonel Blanchard’s staff we interviewed, with one exception, suggested the extraterrestrial as the ultimate solution. And there were dozens of others who had a small piece of the pie that when added to other pieces suggests something other than a weather balloon. 

TheSneezingMonkey Fails in Debunking Roswell

I am growing very tired of the Internet and the number of people who use it to expose their ignorance. Please note the term ignorance. I am granting them the intelligence to realize their mistakes when speaking about UFOs. When they claim a deep dive, it seems to be into the shallow end of the pool, and I realize my task is greater than I thought.

Let’s talk about TheSneezingMonkey and his latest rant about some things Ufological. It is clear to me, that he just doesn’t bother with the deep dive research he claimed which, in the world today and the Internet, is much simpler than it was even a decade ago. The answers are out there, if you’re smart enough to find them.

Take the analysis by TheSneezingMonkey when he is talking about the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. He grabbed several explanations but he talked about the Flying Wing, suggesting that it might be what Arnold had seen. He did question if there would have been several of them flying in formation.  

He was talking about the YB-35 Flying Wing which did exist at the time. Several of them were being tested at Muroc Army Air Field (later Edwards Air Force Base). What he didn’t find, and what I published more than two decades ago, is that in June 1947, all of them were grounded.

Here’s what I know about that. The YB-35, a full-scale Flying Wing, first flew on June 25, 1946 from Muroc AAF. On September 11, 1946, the YB-35, suffering from gear box and propeller problems was grounded. A full-scale flying program would not resume until February 1948. There were test flights made on June 26, 1947 (two days after the Arnold sighting) but the single aircraft did not leave Southern California. The Flying Wing simply was not available in the numbers or location to be seen by Arnold. It really has no place in this discussion in the world today.

Arnold's original drawing to the Army. It looks nothing like the Flying Wing,
which is probably a better way to eliminated that aircraft as the source

But what really set the tone here was a comment made to the YouTube channel by someone calling himself or herself @RUTHAN667. That comment said, “Rosswell is mostly based on Marcell story and he is proven liar, got his moment of fame, lied to be pilot, lied about that he shoot down 5 planes.. Whole family, started finding diaries and milked story dry.. Later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies.. Brasel imprisonning. Corso cashed on it too.”

Well, it’s not Rosswell but Roswell and it’s not Marcell but Marcel. From there we move into territory that isn’t as black and white as it seems. While I wouldn’t call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar, the problem is that he made some claims that were less than truthful. He didn’t say he was a pilot, but had flown as a pilot while serving in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces during World War II.

True, I’m splitting a fine hair here, and it seems unlikely that an officer who is not rated would accumulate that much flight time. I can envision him getting some stick time but not 3000 hours. I can say that I flew as a door gunner in Vietnam but I was not rated in that position. I was a helicopter pilot and later an aircraft commander and accumulated just under 2000 hours during that portion of my career. I’m willing to give him a pass on that particular claim because of the way things worked in aviation units. Clearly, Marcel did participate in combat missions during his tour in the Pacific and was awarded two air medals for that.

Kevin Randle in Vietnam in 1969

However, as we break this down, Marcel apparently told Bob Pratt that he, Marcel, had five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft. I got Marcel’s records and the Unit Histories from the units in which he served. There is no indication that he shot down any enemy aircraft. The Army Air Forces kept records of the majority of those who downed enemy aircraft and Marcel’s name does not appear on the list. And yes, that list includes the names of the men who shot down enemy aircraft in all theaters of the war, and those flying as gunners but not pilots. The enlisted man with the most recorded kills shot down 19 enemy planes, but he was not a pilot. I believe it was Richard Bong who holds the American record with 40. Pappy Boyington, I believe shot down 28 (though I think he was only credited with 26).

At any rate, Marcel doesn’t get a pass on this. There is simply no evidence to support his claim of five air medals (though I have the citations for the two he did receive).

There are other things that he said that we can’t verify. His testimony is problematic. I will note, however, where we have additional witnesses and documentation, then what he said was probably accurate. He did travel to the Brazel (Foster) ranch and he did gather up metallic debris. He did escort that material to Fort Worth.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the Debris Field, 1989.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The whole Marcel family did not begin to find diaries. In going through the papers and files handed down from Jesse Marcel, Sr. to his son and then to the grandchildren in 2013, they did find a “Memorandum Book,” which the Army passed out by the thousands. I have two of them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Marcel was the author of the notations and even if he was, there is nothing in that diary to confirm the events of July 1947. The criticism about finding diaries is inaccurate.

The idea that “later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies…” is not an accurate picture either. The trouble was that we had Bill Brazil, the son of the man who found the debris field, showing us where he had picked up some of the strange debris. It is located southeast of Corona, New Mexico. We, that is Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I were able to find witnesses to that field other than just Marcel (and these include Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer who accompanied Marcel out to the field). Bill Brazel took Don and me to the debris field. He parked his truck and said that this was where he had found some of that debris. Others, such as Loretta Proctor and Bud Payne pointed to the same location.

However, during our investigation, we interviewed several officers and senior NCOs who talked about a much shorter trip to the crash site. While it took three hours or more to arrive at the debris field, they talked about a short trip of under an hour. These included Bill Rickett and Chester Barton. Brigadier General Arthur Exon told us about two sites, oriented northwest to southeast that he had flown over in the weeks that followed. Eventually, witnesses to that second site, where bodies were located, were found.

Don Schmitt and me on the Impact Site, 2023. Site was identified by
several eyewitnesses.

The stories were not invented but recovered through careful investigation and corroboration. It is established that there were two sites and we, Don, Tom and I invented nothing. We just went where the testimonies took us and reported accurately what others said. In many cases, it took long contact with the witnesses for them to trust us with the tale, and then, often, only if we didn’t reveal who they were.

Mack Brazel, the man who started this by taking samples of the metallic debris to  Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox, was held at the Roswell Army Air Field. The base Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, told me Brazel had been held in the guest house, which not the same as being in the stockade, but then, if you’re not allowed to leave, what really, is the difference?

We, Don, Tom and I talked to neighbors of Mack, such as Marian Strickland, who told us he complained about being held on the base. Neighbor Floyd Proctor told researchers that he’d seen Mack in Roswell in the company of several Army officers. That suggests that the story about his being held at the base is true even if the cell didn’t have bars... just guards watching.

So, we see that @RUTHAN667’s rant contains a single fact about Marcel embellishing his resume, which really is lying no matter how I attempt to sugarcoat it. And there are other things that Marcel said that weren’t true. If Marcel was the single witness to this, we could certainly dismiss it as a tale invented by him. But, every member of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff that we interviewed, with a single exception, verified parts of the story. When we expanded the search to other members of the 509^th Bomb Group, we found many officers and enlisted men who were involved in bits and pieces of the story. They might have seen only some of the metal recovered, or were involved in security at various sites, and even a few who did mention the bodies, the story is not stand alone. Many of them did not approach us. We found them and asked questions about those events.

I’ll note here that Major Easley, told me that the craft was extraterrestrial. Well, it was a little different than that. I asked him if we were following the right path. He asked what I meant by that and I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley in 1947. Photo courtesy
of the Roswell Army Air Field Yearbook.

There is so much more that could be said here. You want to talk about mistakes we made. Sure. We believed that Frank Kaufmann was telling the truth until we found evidence that he wasn’t. We, again Don, Mark Rodeghier, Mark Chesney and I exposed those lies in an issue of International UFO Reporter.

But the only fact that @RUTHAN667 got right was that Marcel claimed five aerial victories and had none. Everything else is misinterpretation of the facts or ignoring body of evidence that has been accumulated, vetted, repaired and reported by us. I would suggest reading Roswell in the 21^st Century and Understanding Roswell that I wrote and Tom Carey and Don Schmitt’s Witness to Roswell to get a better interpretation of the situation. And if you want the other side, I’d recommend Karl Pflock’s Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. I’d especially recommend you read the affidavit section of his book. These affidavits were gathered by several of us over many weeks.

I suggest that you, @RUTHAN667, do a little more research before you shoot your mouth off (and learn to spell) and TheSneezingMonkey, if you’re going to be skeptical and claim a deep dive, do a great deal more research.

If the mood moves me, I think next time I’ll attack the Washington National sightings. I interviewed two of the officers who were in the radar room during some of those sightings, and have transcripts of interviews with one of the fighter pilots who talked about the lights surrounding him during an attempted intercept.

And don’t even get me started on the Pascagoula abduction. Yes, I talked to both Hickson and Parker and TheSneezingMonkey wasn’t even close on his ridiculous analysis.