Gilles Fernandez, Project Mogul and More Roswell Minutia

 

For those tired of the Roswell minutia, you can blame Gilles Fernandez for this trip down memory lane. In my post about the material photographed in General Ramey’s office, I wrote, in response to a question by another commentator, “Marcel told reporter Johnny Mann of WWL-TV in New Orleans that stuff in that photograph was NOT the stuff he had brought from Roswell. Thomas DuBose, the Eighth Air Force Chief of Staff (a very high-level position) that the stuff in the photographs (and he's in two of them) was switched. It wasn't the real debris.”

Thomas DuBose with Don Schmitt after one of the interviews

in Florida during our investigation of the events in 1947.

Gilles, in response to that quote, asked, “Concerning the so-called "Johnny Mann's interview: You can provide us such an interview and record? A link, PLEASE? And then the audio source, we can or not?”

A fair question that was somewhat hostile, though I would point out that the skeptical community accepts all that Charles Moore said about Project Mogul without critical comment, but I digress.

The short answer is that there is not an audio source. I did not record the conversation because, at the time, it didn’t seem to be all that important. Mann was just one more voice confirming that Marcel had said those pictures were not of the material he had found. All this had arisen, back in the mid-1990s, as we all began to question the source of the material that had been photographed in Ramey’s office. Skeptics were pointing out that the photographs published in The Roswell Incident, were cropped versions of larger photographs that clearly did show a rawin radar target, badly degraded and the neoprene envelop of a weather balloon. Those of us who saw the whole picture back in the early 1990s knew what they showed even before the skeptics began to beat their drum.

Bill Moore, according to The Roswell Incident, wrote, “Actually,’ said Major Jesse Marcel, shown kneeling here amid what he described as some of the less spectacular pieces of wreckage,’ this material may have looked like tinfoil and balsa wood, but the resemblance ends there.” That quote attributed to Marcel, and found as captions to the pictures in The Roswell Incident, is confusing.

Major Jesse Marcel in General Ramey's office with

the remains of the rawin radar target.

If that statement is accurate, then the discussion and the investigation end right there. The full, uncropped version proved that because it shows a weather balloon and rawin radar target. But, because nothing is ever simple in UFO investigations, that’s not the end of it.

I knew that Johnny Mann had interviewed Marcel in the early 1980s and had even taken him back to Roswell so that they could film a segment for Mann’s television station, WWL-TV in New Orleans. Mann said he also traveled to Pascagoula to interview Hickson and Parker about their abduction. At the time, Mann thought the abduction was the bigger story, so, after the segments aired, they reused the tapes, so the raw footage was no longer available… except they kept the raw footage of Hickson and Parker interview (which, I probably should mention to Philip Mantle and Irene Scott).

Mann had a copy of The Roswell Incident with him and he showed the pictures to Jesse Marcel, saying, “Jess, I gotta tell you, that looks like the remains of a weather balloon.”

Marcel said that it wasn’t the stuff that he had brought from Roswell. It was something else. The implication was that it had been switched. As far as I know, Bill Moore never produced a tape of Marcel saying it was the real stuff as quoted in his book. And I have no tape of what Mann said to me because I didn’t tape the conversation.

Why not, you might ask?

Because there was other evidence, some of which had been taped. Colonel Thomas DuBose, the 8^th Air Force Chief of Staff, and who appears in two of the pictures taken of the material in Ramey’s office, confirmed that the material had been switched. In an interview, conducted in 1991 and is on tape, said that “the switch was made to get the reporters off the general’s back.”

General Roger Ramey and Colonel Thomas Dubose
with the substituted wreckage in Ramey's office.

So, while I don’t have a tape of what Mann said to me, we do have a taped interview from another source telling us that the material in the pictures is not the stuff that Marcel had brought to Fort Worth.

During the filming of UFOs Are Real, Marcel, at one point, said that if he was in the pictures, then it was the real stuff, but then, shown the pictures taken in Ramey’s office said, “There’s a picture in the same room [meaning Ramey’s office]. It’s not the material I brought there [meaning to Fort Worth].

(For those interested, this came from the shot script for UFOs Are Real, Tape One, Page Two).

Then it gets worse if possible. Marcel is quoted in the transcript, apparently paraphrasing Ramey, “You can go ahead and scatter some of those pieces on the floor for the photographers and press but make sure they don’t get any details about anything.”

There was a question asked at that point in the interview. “Was that the actual material you had found?”

“I prepared that for the press. (That big piece was not part of it). [parens in the original document.]

(This came from the shot script for UFOs Are Real, Tape Two, Page One).

Marcel then adds, “Let me show you something. There’s a picture of the same room. It’s not the material I brought there.” That, of course, are the six pictures shot by J. Bond Johnson, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and sent out over the news wires. Given the available documentation, we know those photographs were taken on July 8, 1947.

On tape three the interviewer said, “I talk about the book I’m showing him [which must be something with the pictures from Ramey’s office.] Book in Jesse’s lap showing warrant officer [Irving Newton]. The interviewer asked, “This is not the material you found?”

This means that Newton, seen in the seventh of the pictures kneeling with the balloon, is not what Marcel had brought to Fort Worth.

Marcel responded that question, saying, “Definitely not.”

This came from the shot script for UFOs Are Real, Tape Three).

Confusing enough?

Now we get to Linda Corley who interviewed Marcel in his home in Houma, Louisiana, in 1981 as part of her graduate studies. Gilles is quick to warn me not to bring up Corley because of Stan Friedman. Gilles wrote, “Maybe, you will next point to me Linday Corley 1981 tapes. Please, dont (sic) do this, I know how Stanton Friedman "recorded" this again.”

I’m not sure, but I believe the accusation is that Friedman altered the tapes that Corley had loaned him. He makes this allegation without evidence; however, it is an attempt to eliminate Marcel’s claim that the material in the pictures was not the debris he had recovered on the Brazel ranch. A point that Marcel made repeatedly to others.

Remember, all this started because I had mentioned the Mann interview, which I hadn’t recorded. Gilles has disposed of this by suggesting the interview can be rejected because there is no way to verify it. I did, provide the information in the mid-1990s when it would be possible to corroborate the statements with Mann himself.

Corley’s critical information was published in her book, For the Sake of My Country, when she asked Marcel about the pictures in Ramey’s office. He said, “What you see in there is nothing but a piece of brown paper that I put over so that the news media couldn’t get a picture of what I had.”

Corley asked, Oh, you were covering the stuff?

Marcel replied, “I was covering it. But nobody knew that. I was told by my commanding general, ‘Just don’t say anything. Don’t show anything…’”

Later he said, “You see this picture right here? That’s a fake. After I left there… He claimed it was fragments of a weather balloon… This is part of a weather balloon.”

There is another aspect to this that seems to be important. Marcel told Corley that he had never met either Bill Moore or Stan Freidman in person. They had only talked on the telephone. That made we wonder if Marcel made his statements about the real material without seeing the pictures. Knowing Stan Friedman, I can’t believe that he hadn’t sent Marcel copies of those pictures, but if he hadn’t, then Marcel might have been confused on the issue. That suggests that other pictures had been taken with the real debris at some other time in a different location but we have never found those, if they exist.

The problem here is that this is my speculation but it is based on extrapolations from the situation at the time and the fact that when Marcel saw the pictures from the book, said that is wasn’t the stuff that he had taken to Fort Worth.

There is another aspect that Gilles keeps harping on, which is related to but not essential to this conversation. He wrote, more than once, “You are wrong and somehow "betraying" your readers: Technical report 1 PROOVES it flaw.”

This is a reference to Flight #4, which becomes clear in the rest of Gilles’s comment. I believe he is suggesting that because it was not recorded and absent in the tables, it didn’t exist. He wrote:

If this flight is not reported and/or recorded in the tables, it is for what I wrote, than in my blog or in my book:*** is not present in the table summary that it was canceled or never existed, but because:

Or no attempt or no materials to control/record the altitude were made.
Or because special gear or technic tested.

Or due to different failures on ground or during the flight.

You wrote: "that are missing HERE" (the caps lock are mines) in this interview. You well know the original question (it was concerning the tables and the absence or missing flights in the tables); therefore why some flights are missing in the tables."you don't have it there": "there" = in the tables.”

While I admire anyone who can communicate in a foreign language, I do not speak or read French. I do have a limited knowledge of Spanish and have communicated with Spanish speakers in their language but I imagine they have some difficultly in understanding me. But, as they say, “I digress.”

I believe the claim here is that I created the idea of Flight #4 as a way of eliminating the debris displayed in Ramey’s office from the conversation. But I’m not the one to introduce that concept into the discussion. In a “white paper” created by Charles Moore, an engineer working with the balloons in Alamogordo, we learn the following:

According to C.S. Schneider’s progress report for May 1947, NYU Flight #3 from Bethlehem, PA on May 8 was the last attempt to carry instruments aloft before June 4, whereas they accent on June 5 was identified as NYU Flight #5. On this basis, I [Charles Moore] think the June 4^th balloons carried NYU Flight #4, although there is no mention of this flight in the NYU summary because no altitude data were obtained.

Charles Moore reviewing the winds aloft data that I suppled for the
analysis of the track Flight #4 might have followed. Yes, I have
published this before but it shows that I followed all paths
searching for the truth. I did work with Moore.

The Skeptical Inquirer provided us with 70 facts about the Roswell Incident. Kendrick Fraizer wrote:

The reporter should have told readers what we now know (almost certainly) the debris to have been: remnants of a long vertical “train” of research balloons and equipment launched by New York University atmospheric researchers and not recovered—specifically, Flight No. 4. The research team launched NYU Flight #4 on June 4, 1947, from Alamogordo Army Air Field and tracked it flying east-northeast toward Corona. It was within seventeen miles of the Brazel ranch when the tracking batteries failed and contact was lost.

And this comes from Smithsonian Magazine, written by Pat Trenner and published on July 7, 2010:

Mogul Flight 4 was launched from Alamogordo on June 4, 1947, and is likely the source of the debris Brazel brought to Sheriff Wilcox. 

According to Charles Moore, there was a Flight #4 but no data was recovered so there was no entry in that Technical Report 1. But Charles Moore provided comment in various places including his: March 16, 1995 paper, “The New York University Balloon Flights During Early June, 1947, and additional information from the Air Force report that includes Technical Report 1 that are relevant to the discussion.

According to the written record Mogul Flight No. 4 was cancelled. There is no equivocation about it. The flight was cancelled, which should be the end of the story… but no, Albert Crary’s diary, one of those records, and part of the source material, mentions that a cluster of balloons was flown on the date in question. This was allegedly Flight No. 4.

The documentation from the New York University balloon project shows that the first successful flight in New Mexico was Flight No. 5. But Moore claimed that Flight No. 4 was just as successful; they just didn’t record it (see page 11 of his white paper). If it was as successful, then why not record it and tout it as the first successful flight in New Mexico? Why not report the data collected rather than leave it out of the record altogether. Why would Crary say the flight had been cancelled if it had actually flown and was successful?

This, I believe, negates the claim that there was no Flight #4 to be cancelled and certainly refutes the idea that this was somehow my creation. Even Charles Moore referred to Flight #4 suggesting that it had performed as well as Flight #5.

But now we come back to Johnny Mann and what he said to me. Gilles Fernandez would like something more concrete than my reported conversations with Mann. At that time, I had called Mann to ask him about his interview with Marcel, it just wasn’t that important to record it. I didn’t record it because I was verifying the facts as laid out in other, recorded interviews and published information from other researchers. I asked about the pictures and Mann told me that Marcel told him that the material was not what he had found in the field. We have Marcel on film and on tape saying the same thing in other interviews.

That same afternoon, I called Jesse Marcel, Jr. and basically asked the same question and got the same answer. Since there was documentation that Marcel, Sr. had made the statements to others about the debris being switched, it seemed to be unnecessary to record the information. Even if you reject what Mann told me, or more importantly, you reject Mann’s statements without a tape or recording to consult, all these other sources confirm that Marcel said, repeatedly, that the pictures taken in Ramey’s office was not the material he had found in the field.

I don’t mind Gilles asking the question, but given all this other, documented testimony, it seems to be irrelevant. Eliminate the Mann interviews that I conducted, there are all these other statements made by Marcel about the pictures, many of them on tape.

We’re back to the point about what we want to believe about those events. We do have Colonel DuBose telling us that the material in Ramey’s office was switched. When we, and I mean Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I, investigated this, we had statements from two of the men in the office that day, DuBose and Marcel. We can prove what they said because of the recorded interviews. My discussion with Mann added the same thing. Marcel denying what was seen in the pictures was the material Brazel had found and Marcel recovered.

This then, is my long response to the question as by Gilles Fernandez. No, I have no recording of my interview with Johnny Mann, but then I can point you to other recordings and documentation that verifies the information as I reported it.

Now, it’s up to you, as the reader, to decide where the truth lies in all this. Clearly Marcel seemed to contradict himself on the matter and we can speculate about why that is. But the point here, is that I have additional evidence that verifies the information that Mann supplied to me. I didn’t invent the quotes as has been alleged.

I hope the answer to Gilles Fernandez’s question is adequate. He doesn’t have to believe me, but there is confirmation about the accuracy of the statement. And, in addition, I hope this is my last word on this very narrow aspect of the Roswell case.

(PS) For those of you playing along at home, let me point out another item that is consistently misstated. While the ultimate purpose of Mogul was to spy on the Soviets was top secret, the activities in Alamogordo were unclassified. This is the reason that a Mogul array was photographed and article about the balloon project was published in newspapers around the country on July 10.

The front page of the Alamogordo News on July 10, showing off the balloon arrays
in the attempt to prove that the project was responsible for the Roswell debris.

Get it? They made no Herculean effort to recover the remains of other flights because there was nothing in them that would reveal the purpose of the flights and it wouldn’t lead to Mogul. Photographs and newspaper article were not violating national security. As a former Air Force intelligence officer, I understand these things. I could talk all day about the activities in Alamogordo and it was no violation or compromise of project. If I mentioned the purpose, then I would be in trouble because that was what was classified. Can we retire this nonsense now?)