Saturday, April 28, 2007

Sheridan Cavitt and the Roswell Crash

We have seen Jesse Marcel, Sr. beat up over the interview that he gave to Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer. We have seen every remark he made scrutinized for every nuance, every misstatement that can be turned into a lie, and every flaw in his record turned into a reason not to believe him.

On the other side of the aisle, we see Sheridan Cavitt as the poster boy for the balloon theory. Cavitt, who made many statements about his involvement, or lack of involvement, seems to have received a pass on this. So, let’s look at the record.

My first interview with Cavitt was held on January 29,1990 while Cavitt and his wife Mary stayed in Sierra Vista, Arizona. They had rented a small apartment there to get away from the weather in Sequim, Washington where they lived the rest of the year. Cavitt was cordial but careful in what he said. He made it clear that he had not been involved in any balloon retrievals, that he had no time for that sort of nonsense, and in fact, hinted that he hadn’t even been in Roswell at the time, so it couldn’t have been him.

He did say that if he had written a report, it would have gone to Washington and not to the 8th Air Force, parent organization of the 509th Bomb Group. This makes sense to me because Cavitt was with the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) and his chain of command ran through them and not the 509th.

He said that witnesses who put him on the crash site were wrong and asked me why I thought they would say that. I thought at the time because he was there, but I didn’t say that. I would later learn that I was right.

During that interview, he was only nervous once and that was when we began talking about the bodies. He looked at me, leaned forward and picked up a magazine, sat back, tossed the magazine to the table and asked "Bill Rickett tell you that?"

Lewis "Bill" Rickett (seen at the left) was the non-commissioned officer in charge (NCOIC) of the CIC office in Roswell in July 1947. Cavitt worked closely with him.

When I said, "No," Cavitt visibly relaxed.

I saw him again in 1993, when Don Schmitt and I visited him at his home in Washington. He told us that he had been sent to Roswell on Special Order No. 121, dated 11 June 1947. He was given a five day delay in route. He claimed not to have been physically present at Roswell in early July, 1947, so he could not have been involved in the retrieval. That, we would learn later was not accurate.

During the interview held on March 27, 1993, Cavitt again said that he had not gone out to the Brazel ranch. We talked about that for a while and then Cavitt asked, "Are you guys convinced that I wasn’t there."

Mary Cavitt said, "If he had been way overnight, at that time... I would for sure remember it."

I mentioned that there were some problems with the Marcel testimony, meaning the things that Pratt had reported.

Cavitt said, "You better believe that. He [Marcel] says I was out there is his biggest problem."

But then, as we continued to talk with Cavitt, he made it clear that he was, in fact, in Roswell at the right time. He had just arrived, or was about to arrive, depending on the date of the crash and his mood at the moment. His wife had arrived on July 2, after a wedding in Oregon and Cavitt was supposed to have arrived a day or so after that.

The last personal interview with Cavitt took place on June 25, 1994, just weeks after Colonel Richard Weaver had been there for the Air Force investigation of Roswell. We covered much of the same ground. I mention that Marcel had identified him as the one who went out to the site. That Marcel had described him as "a good west Texas boy from San Angelo."

Cavitt said, "Sort of nails me, doesn’t it?" But he would go no further, and even though Weaver had identified him as the man who had gone out with Marcel, and that interview would be published, Cavitt still tried to make us believe that he had not participated in the event. This despite what Marcel said and what Rickett said.

What all this boils down to is that Cavitt said he wasn’t in Roswell at the time of the recovery, that he was there but that he didn’t go out, he didn’t go out with Marcel, that he was involved in no recoveries of balloon debris, he wasn’t gone overnight, and he doesn’t know why he was cast into this role.

It is, you might say, Cavitt’s word against Marcel, and if you are in the debunker camp, you naturally fall on the side of Cavitt. He was just a good officer, doing his duty, at that time the only living witness according to the story, of what happened at the Brazel (Foster) ranch. So, who do you believe?

To answer that, let’s take a look at Cavitt’s testimony to Colonel Weaver, who visited him in 1995. That interview was published in Air Force produced, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert (and we’ll see who wrote the fiction as we try to sort through all of this).

Remember that Cavitt told me, on tape and in other conversations that he had not participated in any balloon recoveries (Storm clouds over a portion of the debris field in 1989). Remember also, he was quite clear that he had not gone out with Marcel. That he wished Marcel hadn’t named him. He said, "You better believe that. He says I was out there is his biggest problem."

Now, here is what he told Weaver. "Well, there again I couldn’t swear to the dates, but in that time, which must have been July, we heard that someone had found some debris out not to far from Roswell and it looked suspicious; it was unidentified. So, I went out and I do not recall whether Marcel went with Rickett and me; I had Rickett with me. We went out to his site. There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil, something of that type. And we gathered up some of it. I don’t know where we even tried to get all of it. It wasn’t scattered, well, what I would call, you know, extensively. Like it didn’t go along the ground and splatter off some here and some there. We gathered up some of it and took it back to the base and I remember I had turned it over to Marcel. As I say, I do not remember whether Marcel was there or not on the site. He could have been. We took it back to the intelligence room... in the CIC office."

So, here we now have Cavitt saying that he had gone out on a balloon recovery, that he might have gone out with Marcel, but he wasn’t sure, that he was involved in the recovery in early July, and that he might have turned over some of the recovered material to Marcel.

Weaver’s next question was, "What do you think it was when you recovered it?"

"I thought it was a weather balloon."

So Cavitt was able to identify it immediately. To me, Weaver’s next question, given the history of the case, should have been, "Did you communicate this rather important piece of information to Marcel?"

Instead, he asked, "Were you familiar with weather balloons at the time?"

And Cavitt said, "I had seen them."

It has always been an article of faith that the Mogul balloon array was unusual enough that it could stump the people who found it (One of the arrays seen at the left). Because it wasn’t a single balloon, but many, with many radar reflectors and long strings connecting everything, people who were familiar with weather balloons might not recognize them as such. But Cavitt claimed that he did. More importantly, he didn’t bother to tell Marcel what it was.

What we now know is that Marcel said that Cavitt had gone out there with him, but Cavitt had made it clear that he had not. We know that Marcel was right on that point, given Cavitt’s new information that Marcel might have been with him. It isn’t Marcel vs Cavitt here, but Cavitt vs Cavitt.

We can go further. Remember Cavitt said, "There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it."

Cavitt said he was with Rickett. Here is what Rickett said about that in a taped interview conducted by Don Schmitt, "I [meaning Rickett], Marcel went back out there that same afternoon. This time they had some security people from the Provost Marshal’s office out there."

Just so we have this straight, because it could be argued that Cavitt had not seen the security out there because it was put there after he had been in the field, Rickett said, "Cavitt and I came back together and I’m not sure if Marcel came with us... it was being protected..." So, Rickett was out there more than once, he was with Cavitt on, at least one of those trips, and Rickett saw the guards.
Later, to confirm this, Rickett said, "On the road we drove on, [there were] MP s standing there..."

The argument here is between Rickett and Cavitt. Cavitt said no guards and Rickett said guards. Others, such as Judd Roberts, William Woody and even C. Bertram Schultz said there were checkpoints along the dirt roads leading off the main highways to the north and west. This means that Cavitt was wrong on that point as well.

If we look at his description of the debris that he claimed he picked up, we find that it doesn’t match Project Mogul. There weren’t bamboo sticks in it. Balsa wood, yes. His description of the crash site matches no one else, including that supplied by Bessie Brazel, daughter of Mack, and who told investigators what she, her father and her brother Vernon, had seen. She also said that they picked up the debris so there was nothing in the field for Cavitt to see. But that is something to examine in another post.

What this means is that the testimony given by Cavitt is not very reliable. Clearly he was saying to Weaver what Weaver wanted him to say. Clearly, he was telling me things that were not consistent and that have since been proven false. He even proved to me that his statement that he wasn’t in Roswell was wrong because he showed me copies of his orders assigning him there.

This means that we must look at the statements provided by Cavitt and compare them with the statements of others. Do they fit into the picture, or it is Cavitt standing alone, making statements that are not corroborated by others. With Cavitt, even the man who worked directly under him, is contradicting him and as I noted, Cavitt doesn’t even agree with Cavitt.

While this doesn’t prove that Roswell involved extraterrestrial contact, it does show the extraordinary effort the Air Force went to in 1947 and later in 1994 to prove that it was just a weather balloon (yes, but Mogul was made up of weather balloons). And it shows that the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt, like so many others, isn’t completely reliable.

19 comments:

Bob Koford said...

The "non-professional" researchers into this subject, such as myself, can only go by what we have read up to this point. Even after digesting everything available, from every source (including most of your books), we can only work with the available information. That is why it is so helpful to get the little details, like the ones you continually bring up on this blog.

For me, it is exactly this type of back-and-forth action, playing loosey-goosey with the facts, whether its Kauffman, Cavitt, Rickett, or any other military or connected witness, that really makes it obvious that we aren't talking about ANY mundane artifacts...balloon or otherwise.

Thanks again for your continued efforts, and thanks for your tour of duty!

Joseph Capp said...

Thank you for an very interesting article. Cavett has change his story so many times you would think he was hiding something. If he had been advocating a crashed UfO the skeptics would have demanded a lie detector test. But of course lie detectors test are only for those who disagree with the status quo.
Thank You again
for your service to the truth.

Joseph Capp
UFO Media Matters

Doc Conjure said...

Cavitt appears to have 'cauliflower' growing out of his head in pic 1.

-Jason

Gerald O'Connell said...

To me the killer quote is when Cavitt says "Bill Rickett tell you that?" at the mention of bodies. Why might he think the information would have come from Rickett? Why isn't his first reaction one of dismissal or flat denial?

Has Rickett been briefed several times over the years on what to say and now become worried that his story is going to conflict with that of Rickett (with whom he may have compared notes)?

CDA said...

Kevin:

You have not established that Cavitt was present at the Roswell crash site at all. Why not have a look at Moore& Friedman's account of their interview with Cavitt in Sept 1982, as published in FOCUS magazine in June 1990 (why the 8-year delay?). This was over 7 years before your own interviews with Cavitt, and deserves some attention. You never mention this interview in your own writings, do you?

Notice how Cavitt possessed and had read The Roswell Incident before Moore met him. Questions arise: why did he have this book? Perhaps because someone told him his name was in it. But after reading it, if he (Cavitt) had been genuinely involved with Marcel at Roswell the natural thing was for him to contact the authors and relate his side of the story. Yet he never did. Most strange!

After all, an earth-shattering event supposedly occurred at Roswell in July 1947, involving ETs. Yet here was this man (Cavitt) having read the book, seeing his name in it, apparently calmly putting it aside as if it were something of no value.

Work that one out, but my conclusion is that Cavitt ignored the episode for one reason - that it was of minor, or zero, importance. Or that he was not there and that, after 32 years, Marcel had simply confused him with someone else.

M & F spent a great deal of time tracking him down. Strange that Cavitt never contacted the authors in the first place.

Christopher Allan (UK)

KRandle said...

I don't use the Moore material because so much of it is unreliable. We have multiple examples of the same quotes altered as the information evolves. Besides, why use his stuff when I wa able to interview the man himself. This way I don't have to speculate about motives and reliability... yes, I know the same thing cn be said about me, but I do try to provide the evidence to show the quotes and material is accurate.

I'm not sure that someone finding his name in a book would require him to contact the authors. My own experience would suggest that this isn't always the case and the explantion for the lack of contact might be as simple as "they haven't found me yet, why give them the information?" I really don't know what his motivation might have been.

The one thing that disturbs me abou your note, however, is the opening remark that I haven't established that Cavitt was at the crash site. I simply don't understand this. Rickett said he was there. Marcel said he was there. Cavitt said he was there.

Yes, Cavitt denied he was there, but then said he was. It seems to me that the consensus is that he was there.

My point had been to show that the slightest deviation by Marcel was attacked immediately, yet Cavitt, when he deviated from earlier statements was given a pass. My point was that Cavitt was not consistent in his statements and that often his statements were cherry picked to provide the anti-crash evidence. My point was simply that his testimony might have been given with alterior motives in mind.

CDA said...

In July 1991 I published in ORBITER an article saying why I firmly believed that Rickett & Dr Lincoln LaPaz were not involved with Roswell but with a event 18 months later to do with the 'green fireballs' seen over New Mexico. I said that Rickett, recalling his UFO involvement 40 years later,had confused these events. I would say much the same about Cavitt.

Refer to Loren Gross' 1949 history and you will see a reference to a 'Sheridan W Cavitt' and a Sept 1949 report he wrote (subject matter not given). There is another Cavitt report dated Dec 23, 1948, which I possess, from Kirtland AFB on the subject of Unknown Aerial Phenomena around Walker AFB, Roswell during the period 15-22 Dec 1948.

Rickett himself wrote a report on his trips around Roswell and other parts of NM to interview witnesses to the green fireballs. Dr LaPaz, in one of his many written reports, praises Rickett for his assistance. (Rickett wrote his own report jointly with Paul L. Ryan and Jack B. Williams; dated 11 Feb 1949. He is described as "Special Agent Bill Rickett"). A big fireball episode had occurred on Jan 30 of that year, including the Roswell area, and LaPaz, Rickett and others were heavily involved in searching for witnesses and trying to chart the object's path.

I mention all this because I feel very doubtful over Rickett's (and Cavitt's) memory decades later, over a 1947 event for which there is absolutely no official written record; whereas there is an abundance of written records of their involvement in the later events mentioned above.

Where are the contemporary reports on the Roswell case? Why did they not surface during the GAO searches? On such a momentous ET event like that claimed, there must have been literally tons of paper produced. Where is it all?
Did Cavitt and/or Rickett ever write their Roswell reports, or are such reports fictitious?

You are not, I hope, going to shelter behind the old 'above top secret' or 'all destroyed' excuses. Nothing of such magnitude (if that were the case) would ever be destroyed or lost. It is inconceivable. I do not have to be a former military person to know this.

You can learn a lot from the Moore & Friedman earlier interviews and write-ups. You can also take the view (as I would) that Cavitt initially doubted whether he was there at the ranch, but M & F gradually, with a bit of persuasion, coaxed him around into thinking that maybe he was there after all. (Indeed, Marcel had already mentioned his name to them). By the time you got to Cavitt seven or so years later the damage had been done. He was in two minds and confused.

Slightly revising my first comment, I would hazard a guess that the reason Cavitt had the Roswell Incident book when they met him is that they had sent him a copy a few months before to 'refresh his memory'. But in the event he was unimpressed and at first denied involvement. Moore then feigned surprise when Cavitt produced the book from his shelf and asked Moore to autograph it.

How much easier your task would be if Cavitt & Rickett had been mentioned in the 1947 press reports!

Christopher Allan

KRandle said...

That Rickett and La Paz went out 18 months later to search for remains of the Green Fireballs does not mean that Cavitt and Rickett didn't go out to the crash site in Roswell. It might be that Rickett linked the two events in his mind, believing that his work with La Paz was a result of the Roswell crash. Yes, after so many years, people can, and do, become confused, but there is experimental evidence that shows these sorts of "flash bulb" memories are often highly accurate. It all depends.

No, I'm not going to agree to eliminate the idea that classified material and the improper destruction of classified material isn't a factor here. We know, based on a document that the Skeptical Community loves to cite, Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79 that even the officers who had top secret clearances and who were charged with finding out about the flying suacers were not allowed to see everything. They wrote that they did not have all the "privileged" they needed, and they were searching for answers at the request of some very high ranking officers.

And don't forget that the GAO found that some of the Roswell message traffic had been improperly destroyed. Sure, I'll agree that there probably nothing nefarious in that. It probably just means, that as the officers were cleaning out their safes, something that is routinely done, they destroyed the material for which they no longer had use, and documented that destuction improperly. I know that classified material is destroyed when it is of no use the holding agency, it has outlived its usefulness or it is superceded by newer and better information. I know that the destruction of classified material at the secret level and above must be documented but sometimes that just doesn't happen. I see nothing in the GAO finding that is really extraordinary... but having said that, I will also note that it does leave the door open, even if that opening is small.

I will note here, that it wasn't that Cavitt doubted his involvement at the ranch but that he denied it... sort of. It was later that he changed his mind which could mean that he believed he was digging himself in deeper... not to mention that he held the documentation that proved he was wrong. After Marcel identified him, and then Rickett identified him, and he realized that parts of his service record were open to public scrutiny, that he told me he had been there and then explained to COL Weaver his role there.

And yes, it would be nice if Cavitt and Rickett had been named in some of the 1947 documents. It would be nice to have a better paper trail in this. But, at the moment, that is sort of limited.

CDA said...

Kevin:

There are very serious problems with your version of Roswell, and they won't go away. The chief problem is that there is absolutely no documentation on this incident, even after 6 decades (apart from the one brief FBI teletype - big deal).

Consider the situation. Here we have, according to yourself & others, maybe the most important scientific discovery of all time. If you are correct and it was a genuine ET craft that crashed to earth and bodies discovered, there would be literally tons & tons of paperwork & photos on the case. Think of all the military reports, think of all the universities & government institutions (military & civilian) that must have been involved in analysing the wreckage and the bodies over many months or years. Think of all the scientists that were involved. Hundreds, thousands?

There is plenty of paperwork on the green fireballs, plenty on US and foreign experimental aircraft, missiles, nuclear weapons, space projects and so on, even plenty on other UFO events. Blue Book archives run to umpteen reels of microfilm. Yet not one iota has ever surfaced on Roswell.
What has happened? Do you really suppose each & every document on Roswell has either gone missing or been destroyed, or is still under wraps?

What is going on here? Sooner or later you have got to accept that something is seriously, very seriously, wrong with your version of Roswell. It cannot have happened in the way you claim. Cavitt, Rickett, LaPaz, Ramey, Blanchard plus a zillion others must have produced written analyses. Where are they? I repeat: there would be documentation several miles deep on this affair. Where is it, after 60 years?

It has nothing to do with the destruction of trivial papers from the Roswell base during 47-49. It has much more to do with the total absence of any documentation from anywhere at any time.

This has resulted in years of wasted effort by people to decipher the 'Ramey memo', the Ft Worth photos, the MJ-12 forgeries and so on. "If the real documents aint there we shall put them there" is what these people are trying to do. (The same applies to the alleged pieces of debris.)

You will have to face the awful truth one day, I fear, which is this: The Roswell Incident was an event of no significance.

You can always disprove me by locating the said documentation, hardware or bodies.

CDA

KRandle said...

Of course the lack of documentation is a real problem for the Roswell case, but let’s remember, there is some. First is the FBI memo that you mention. Here is the question about that. Why no follow up memos or information? Why nothing to clarify the situation, or, at the very least, correct the inaccurate information? That it hasn’t been found might be significant.

As an ancillary to that, why no mention of Roswell in the Project Blue Book files. Given the media attention to the case, and the fact that other hoaxes are well represented in those files, Roswell should be there but it’s not. That might be significant... and no, the single mention in a short news article about flying saucers in a file unrelated to Roswell does not count.

Second, Ramey might, in fact, be holding a piece of the documentation. If we say nothing else about it, we have to agree on the provenance. We have a date for the photograph, courtesy of the Bettmann Photo Archives, and we know where it came from because we see Ramey holding it. If David Ruidak is right, then we have the smoking gun.

Third, we have the eyewitnesses. Yes, many have been shown to be liars, frauds and charlatans, but that doesn’t negate the few who are solid people and who talked about the crash remains as extraordinary.

Fourth, we have the reaction of the government to this case. Holding a rancher for several days, a PR campaign to “prove” that the flying saucers in general and the Roswell case in particular can be explained as a balloon and a campaign to end discussion suggests something about the case. Why, even that top secret, so important that Charles Moore didn’t know the name of it Project Mogul was revealed in newspapers in the days following the claim by the Army that it had captured a flying saucer.

Fifth, we have the coincidence of the July 9, 1947, AP report in which it is claimed that “The Army and the Navy moved today to suppress stories of flying saucers whizzing through the atmosphere.” Why suddenly, on July 9 did they care when, in the days after the Kenneth Arnold report, they didn’t care.

Finally, the Mogul explanation simply doesn’t work. You can’t put the balloon array on the ranch, there is a real chance that there was no Flight No. 4 which means it explains nothing, and even if there was, the various descriptions of the debris field leave out Mogul. (See the Chronology in another article for more detail about this.)

So, if it wasn’t Mogul, and it wasn’t an aircraft accident, or a stray rocket, or a flying wing, or even the flying wing with deformed Japanese on it, then what was it?

CDA said...

Re: David Rudiak and the Ramey memo; you suggest that Rudiak may be right. I am not going into all the intricate letter-by-letter, word-by-word analysis, as this has been done ad nauseam by others. I will instead give what is known as a 'reductio ad absurdum' answer.

If Rudiak is right, this would be the first official document acknowledging an event of momentous importance to the world, namely the discovery of intelligent ET life and its visit to our planet. Therefore there would be (as per my previous posting) several miles deep of official documentation on it, involving the work of countless scientists, committees, institutions, etc etc. As such the GAO would undoubtedly have unearthed this stuff during their searches (which is what they were contracted to do). Since no such documents surfaced and since all the relevant agencies deny the existence of any such documentation, Rudiak is wrong. QED.

Nothing more need be said; but I would rate the chance of Rudiak being right on a par with the chance that the CIA murdered Princess Diana.

Re: the FBI teletype, again there was no follow-up because there was nothing to follow up. The AF explained it all at Ft Worth, hence the FBI decided there was nothing further to do. There are no inaccuracies in the teletype either, merely a disagreement between those at Ft Worth, who had seen the debris, and those at Wright Patterson who had not (at least not at that point). Had there been a follow-up message, that too ought to have been found by the GAO.

The AF were concerned enough about the Arnold sighting to send two officers to interview him, and keep in touch with him. They spent far more time on this case than on Roswell, and there is quite a bit of paperwork on the case. These same officers later died in the plane crash after Maury island (another cover-up of course!).

The Mogul answer fits quite well if you go by the 1947 accounts. It is not such a good fit if you go by accounts given 30-50 years afterwards. It has its problems sure, but it is a far better answer than the ET one. (A 60 year ET secret indeed. And not one iota of hardware or paperwork to back it up).

Brazel held incommunicado by the military for a week? I just don't believe it. Brazel, and other civilians, never once saying anything about this amazing, extraordinary discovery (if that be what it was) until his death? I don't believe that either.

Elsewhere you talk about General Exon. According to Karl Pflock Exon did not even have second-hand evidence about wreckage & bodies, let alone firsthand evidence. His story was based entirely on rumors he had heard at WPAFB. And rumors do not count as secondhand or even thirdhand evidence. They are rumors, nothing else. Perhaps Exon was referring to rumors following the Scully book in 1950, as certainly was Sarbacher in his infamous letter of Nov 1983. (The Exon story is in Pflock's book, p.124. )

David Rudiak and others are clutching at straws. And that is all they ever will be clutching at.

CDA

Cassandra said...

This man taught me how to drive a golfcart when i was seven. He was the best Grandfather I could ever ask for. He passed away quite a few years ago do to emphysema. My Grandmother Mary passed away April of 2006. They are missed dearly.

Thank you for posting this.

Aaron said...

The one thing I still can't get around in this whole story is the press release. If the base commander issued that release and it was a weather balloon he is an idiot. But....he was promoted.

If I put myself in his shoes, and one of my officers said we found a UFO, I think I would be curious to see it. Especially if I was a base commander at this base and during this era. Maybe he didn't look at it and when Marcel phoned him and said it was a flying saucer, that was good enough for him and decided to make that press release for the world. Oh and then have his superiors fly in, have to do photo ops to squash the fervor caused by the press release, and fly pieces of a weather balloon to other air bases like Fort Worth. I can see the conversation now, Ramey: "Moron, did you look at the pieces of the balloon before you told your press officer to release this statement?" Blanchard: "Uh, no sir, I just took Marcels word for it" Ramey: "That makes sense. You have a good handle on running this base. You are promoted!"

It doesn't prove it was a UFO, but its the one thing I can't get passed and no one has explained. Then reading stuff about people like Cavitt it just adds more fuel. He is obvioulsy changing stories to conceal something. The question is what?

Anonymous said...

The air-force has consistently though the years, and through the decades, often has treated the 'ROSWELL MYTH' like something that did not even really exist until Jesse Marcel went public in the 70's. It is so easy to disprove this it is not even funny. In fact, my former father in law of nine years was an air-intelligence officer at Wright Field in the 1960's and, after many years of me prodding him, he finally told me how he had heard rumors about the crashed saucer and bodies from the Roswell crash even in the mid 1960's when he was stationed there. What was even more vital for me was the fact that he had a very intense, I'd say even vitriolic hatred, for anything of a 'scifi nature' be it movies, TV shows, or anything having to do with UFO's. So he was certainly not the kind of person who had any inclination at all to make up stories relating to 'little alien grey's'. After finally telling me about the rumors he had heard there in the mid 60's (which took six or seven years) he told me he never wanted to talk about it again. My main point is that it very easy, based on his story, and those of many, many, many others, to prove (not that the Roswell UFO crash really actually occurred) but that the CLAIM that a flying saucer and it's crew had crashed at Roswell was around a long, long time before Marcel went public with his story. Maybe even as soon as the early 1950's. It easily disproves the Airforce's often very contentious and insultingly misleading attitude that the Roswell Myth started when Marcel went public.

Anonymous said...

Considering his job within the military was counterintelligence, then it seems to me that Sheridan Cavitt was "exactly what it says on the tin".
Disinformation, confusion, distraction, sabotage, is the name of the game so it could be said that Cavitt played a blinder to the very end!

Paul Young, Manchester, England.

Unknown said...

As a kid I believed automatically as a grown up I'm torn on one hand I believe and on another I don't I believe because I do not believe anyone even a private in the 509 Bomb Group would mistake a balloon for a spaceship and yet I'm skeptical as well because the Air Force did go to Great pains to hide it and if they did hide it they hid it well

Unknown said...

You don't seem to know at all military protocol something that is still classified and top secret or above you would find no paper trail that's so the average idiot can't just go out there and get the papers saying what it is that's common sense again I respect skepticism but when it dismisses things out of hand and uses no legitimate excuses it becomes debunking which I do not respect

Unknown said...

Again you are absolutely right but you certainly would not be privy to it nor would any of us there's enough eyewitness testimony that at some point the scientific method has to be used and to continue to deny would then become a case of not seeing the forest for the trees

Unknown said...

And I have some oceanfront property in Arizona do you really think all of these people Marcel Blanchard everyone would have been promoted after making a blunder like that now they would have been court-martialed really as I have stated I respect skepticism I've despised debunking all these men wouldn't have been promoted and every single one of them involved was they would have been demoted at best and court-martialed at worst after making one of the biggest blunders in the universe the only nuclear facility in the world at the time mistake of balloon for a spaceship I don't buy that and then all are promoted that just proves it at some point scientific method needs to be used there's too much evidence and yes mountains of people's testimony is evidence promotion of officers after supposedly making the biggest blunder in the world is BIG evidence finally I wouldn't give the keys to the only nuclear facility in the world that would mistake a balloon for a spaceship just think about it logically and skepticism Falls real short that would be stupidity and a court-martial