I recently posted that we had
been looking for any documents, diaries, journals, personal letters or anything
else from July 1947 that mentioned the Roswell case without luck. That wasn’t
exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This doesn’t relate
directly to Roswell, but it had been attached to the information about it for
decades.
Barney Barnett claimed to have
seen a crashed flying saucer on the Plains of San Agustin. There are those who
believe that this happened in July 1947 and the wrecked craft had collided with
the one that fell on the Foster (Brazel) ranch. I don’t subscribe to that theory
and believe the evidence for it is weak at best and more likely nonexistent.
But, as I say, that’s my opinion.
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| Magdalena Ranger Station at the edge of the Plains of San Agustin. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle. |
As we, and by we, I mean Don
Schmitt and I investigated the Roswell case, we were also interested in what
Barney Barnett had said. I had been in touch with Alice Knight, the niece of
Ruth and Barney Barnett. I asked, as had others, if there were any written
documents that related to what Barney had claimed to have seen. The answer had always
been, “No.”
Then, one day, a couple of
decades ago, as I talked with her, the answer changed to, “I found a diary for
1947.”
This was a “Daily Reminder” book
that someone had given to Ruth Barnett. She kept is faithfully for the year of
1947. And for the dates of the crash (and I mean dates because there have been
a number of them offer) it seems that Barney was in no position to see anything
out on the Plains. He was in Socorro on those days, including July 5, the date
that Gerald Anderson claimed he had seen Barney on the Plains.
The point is the diary, however.
We know where Barney was and what he was doing. During that first week in July,
there is no hint that Barney had seen anything extraordinary. That sort of
documentation, from the right time, is difficult to ignore.
Oh sure, the answer is that
Barney had been sworn to secrecy and, of course, didn’t say a word about it to
Ruth. She wouldn’t know anything about the crash and therefore couldn’t have written
anything about it in her diary.
But, there is another aspect to
this. According to family and friends, Barney told them about the crash at a Thanksgiving
dinner in 1947. That means the secret was out and Barney felt comfortable
enough to talk about it to family. But, again, the diary holds no information
about this event either.
I think everyone sees the
problem. We find a document written in 1947 by someone who might not have seen
the crash but whose husband did. She didn’t mention it in her diary. Not when
it happened and not when he told her, other members of the family and friends
about it. This, I believe, argues forcibly against a crash on the Plains in July
1947. We find a document, and there is absolutely no hint about flying saucers
or crashes in it. Somehow, this bit of information is overlooked when we talk
about the Plains… It should be one of the first things mentioned.
10 comments:
I agree with KR's conclusion, but just to play the Devil's Advocate...
If Barney did tell Ruth his story, and explained to her that he was under the strictest orders not to say anything to anyone (including her)...then Ruth, unless she was an idiot, would probably not mention it in her diary.
An entry in her diary would be creating a paper trail that would be able to prove Barney had blabbed when told not to.
Paul Young -
Just to play devil's advocate, if he was sharing the tale around the dinner table to friends and family, I doubt there would be any reason for Ruth to ignore it. There is just nothing in her diary to provide a clue about this adventure, that he apparently shared with many over the years.
I have to admit (even as a skeptic), I've always been somewhat intrigued by the Barnett tale (even though it is second hand) because it surfaced before Roswell became a big national story.
Assuming the story is a hoax, we'd have to assume Vern & Jean Maltais concocted the story based on the limited press exposure at the time....or they knew someone else involved (maybe Marcel himself) and for whatever reason dreamed it up. The former theory is a bit tougher because they approached Stanton Friedman in October of 1978.....and I can't think of too much that was out nationally by that point. IIRC, the National Enquirer put out a story in 1978 on the subject (just a re-print of the original Roswell Daily Record). But not much beyond that.
When, exactly, did the family claim that 1947 was the year Barney told them about it? Was it before the Roswell case became well-known, or after? There were many alleged witnesses (first or second-hand) of saucer crashes who couldn't remember the year, but then attached a 1947 date to it once the Roswell story aired on Unsolved Mysteries in 1989. According to the United States government, some people may have seen crash-test dummies in the desert during the 1960's, but erroneously attributed those to 1947 once they learned of the Roswell story. Could that have occurred with the Barnett case?
The Barnett story first appeared in THE ROSWELL INCIDENT, but the Maltaises were a bit uncertain of the date when they related it to Friedman. My guess is that the Maltaises recalled that the flying saucer epidemic began in 1947 and dated their experience (with Barnett) from then. Or perhaps they knew of the Scully book and confused the Barnett tale with the Scully affair, which was in early 1948. Another possibility is that Barnett had read the Scully (Aztec) tale himself and told it to the Maltaises as if it were his own experience. And so on.....
Are we really getting anywhere? Answer: NO WE ARE NOT (as usual). End of story.
I enjoy your articles old friend. It's been a few years since our Gold Eagle Days, but I would love to get back in touch.
Bill Craig
All -
I believe that when Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz were writing The Roswell Incident they were stuck with nothing that really moved toward the extraterrestrial. Bill Brazel and the others talked of strange metallic debris but at the end of the day, strange metallic debris was just that, strange metallic debris. But Barnett provided a tale of alien bodies. The linked it with the story of Fleck Danley saying that Barnett had told him about the crash in the summer of 1947, but when I talked with Danley, it was clear that he had no real memory of the time. I believe that Danley eventually suggested the summer of 1947 but only after having some help remembering... And if you read The Roswell Incident, you can see that the Maltaises had some help with pinning down the date and the location.
When CDA asks if we're getting anywhere, the answer is, "Yes." We are beginning to understand exactly how some of this information was gathered and we're seeing the difficulties with it. Something that has been suggested in the past but something that we can now understand.
Besides unusual properties, some of the debris had unusual writing, which suggested ET.
I have always been troubled by the accounts of this so-called "memory metal". This apparently impossible to damage, alter, burn etc material, yet here it was strewn all over the "crash site" in pieces, as Marcel sr said "Three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide".
It makes no sense, even if we do take these accounts of "memory metal" as factual.
I have also wondered about Major Marcel. In no way do I doubt his honesty, I do however have to question his judgement, with all due respect. If one was to find such material of unknown origin which had very unusual properties which left one in the opinion that this did not originate on planet Earth....and your reaction is to call in your family home and wake up your kid and empty this stuff on the kitchen or dining room table before taking it to the base. In my opinion, that is extremely poor judgement.
I'm sure people will say it was a good thing he did that because without Marcel Jr's testimony we would be left with no case at all. Yeah, sure would be a shame if we hadn't spent the last 35 years chasing this never-ending red herring wouldn't it?
I used to be in the very pro ET Roswell side of the argument. Now, about 25 years since I began following the fine research people like Kevin Randle and Dennis Balthaser, Friedman and the very awful contributions from those such as Schmitt and Carey, the evidence as it stands does not support an ET origin whatsoever. Yes, there are still some intriguing pieces of testimony here and there such as Edwin Easley's statements to Kevin Randle. However, after just about all other testimony which we all held up to support our point of view turning out to be at best confabulation and at worst downright infuriating lies, it's hard to believe there is any truth to an ET origin.
People say "well you can't just throw the baby out with the bath water". In this case, i'm not sure there was a baby in the bath to begin with, just gallons of murky, cloudy water which only gets more murky and cloudy as time goes by, especially with certain people taking a nice, big piss in the tub from time to time.
@SugarRayTaylor:
Just because the material seemed unbeatable to us doesn't mean ET couldn't blow it apart. The material may have been unusual, but it didn't seem dangerous. It was certainly interesting enough for Marcel to want to show to his family. I very much doubt he would've done that if it was just ordinary balloon junk.
Now it may be true that a lot of the testimony pointing to ET has been discredited. But note the difference between the ET explanation and ALL OTHERS (i.e. earthly or prosaic). Based on what KDR wrote in his latest tome on the subject, ET is still possible (even you admit there's still some good testimony) but MOGUL is NOT. And as I've written before, I very much doubt the skeptics would've clung to MOGUL as long as they did if there were any other workable prosaic explanation.
you still have the problem of finding a workable nonET explanation. The fact that hasn't been done
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