The Roswell Festival - The FBI Telex

 

While on the Roswell Panel at the Festival, I mentioned that we’d found no documents relating to the Roswell crash/retrieval in all the data that had been dumped in the last few months. This is an important point that I’ll come back to later.

The International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell.

One of the panelists, and I don’t remember who, mentioned that the FBI Telex that had originated in the Dallas office on July 8, 1947, was included. Importantly, the only thing that had been redacted in that document said, “Major Curtan [actually Kirton] further advised that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not [two words redacted] borne out this belief.”

It was mentioned that the whole line had been redacted. If true, this was an important discovery because it suggested that someone had redacted the one line that told us the balloon explanation had been denied by those at Wright Field. This would suggest that the transparency claims were not true.

Reacting that line made no sense to me because we’d had an unredacted version of the Telex for more than three decades with nothing redacted. In fact, when the GAO made their investigation in the mid-1990s, the complete, unredacted version as published (with the exception of those two words mentioned earlier).

I believed that the document had surfaced in the third of the data dumps. I searched for it but couldn’t find it. I then sent out an email to many colleagues because, as I say, this could be an important find. I figured someone would have the information, saving me the time looking for it.

Within an hour I learned from Joachim Koch that the document had surfaced in the first of those data dumps. He sent the link to the specific set of documents. It was on page 70 of a much longer document. See can see the file here:

65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_001

The problem, however, is that the whole line was not redacted as had been suggested. Just two words were eliminated and it seemed that it was because of a misspelling. What might have been an important find turned out to be an overreacting to deleting a misspelling. The redaction, while not necessary was of little consequence.

But that led me to another aspect of this. There are many of us looking for information about the Roswell crash/retrieval in those data dumps. Say what you will, take whatever position you believe… it was alien, it was terrestrial, it was Mogul… the newspapers on July 8 and July 9, were filled with stories about the crash. In fact, some of them carried a timeline that covered the release of the information to the conclusion that it was a balloon. The whole cycle lasted about three hours. That means from the time that the press release was given to the media to the time that General Roger Ramey claiming was just a weather balloon.

Walter Haut, the 509^th Bomb Group officer who handed out that press release told me, as he had anyone who asked, that he received telephone calls from around the world and a stack of post cards and letters asking for more information. Haut regretted that he hadn’t save those cards and letters for the stamps on them. We know that reporters were covering the story and again, I spoke to many of them but they were diverted to the balloon story almost from the time they learned at it. At that point, the story died.

Walter Haut at home in 1991. Photo by Kevin Randle

For that short period, this was a very important, front-page story that had all the news media chasing it. Mark Rodeghier even found a national ABC news radio broadcast about it and I have dozens of those newspaper clippings as well.

Here’s the point for those of us who have searched through the data dumps about UAP which are supposed to prove the transparency of the new government policy. I ask, where is the information about Roswell? Where are the newspaper clippings because, in these data dumps, there are dozens of newspaper articles that include other claims of UFO crashes.

The very first article found in the pdf. which contains the FBI Telex, is a July 8 story about a Catholic priest, Joseph Brasky, who found a metal disk. The object was about 18 inches in diameter, resembled a saw blade and was still warm when Brasky found it. He reported the find to the FBI. They seemed uninterested in it.

The point? This obviously terrestrial artifact is reported at length, but the Roswell case, is oddly missing.  There should be other mentions of it. In the Project Blue Book files, there is a single mention of the crash and that refers to a telephone call from Washington, criticizing the officers at Roswell for releasing the information. It is the third paragraph in a four-paragraph newspaper story in another article. All this suggests that the claim of transparency is little more than lip service. At least until we get data we didn’t already have.