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.