'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Tom Carey Retires

 

This week I reached out to Tom Carey, who, while in Roswell for the 75^th Anniversary, announced his retirement from UFO research. I thought it would be interesting to talk about that and learn just what it meant. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/50879536

And for those with a more visual orientation, you can watch the show here:

https://rumble.com/v1fjsbd-kevin-randle-interviews-tom-carey-his-retirement-from-ufo-research.html

Before we got to that, we did talk about how he had gotten into UFO research, and I learned it wasn’t so much an interest in UFOs as it was an interest in the Roswell case. He had joined MUFON and later CUFOS, for the publications rather than being sucked into UFO investigation. He did do some of that, but soon realized that a tale of another light in the sky didn’t actually advance our knowledge. There were lots of those stories but with little evidence other than the testimony of the witness.

Tom Carey at his table at the Roswell Festival.

This was a conclusion that I had realized as well. A private pilot flying over the town at three in the morning with his landing light on and the wind blowing away from the witness might only see the light. Without other information, just the witness on the ground reporting the light, there is no real way to find an explanation.

Tom concentrated on the Roswell case to the exclusion of most other cases. But he said that the witnesses are all gone now. If the soldier was twenty in 1947, he was now 95, if still alive. The case had devolved into the second and third hand witnesses. Those who heard the story from fathers or brothers or others who had been in Roswell in 1947.

I mentioned Dalton Smith who had popped up on my radar about a week earlier. As noted in the posting about him, we hadn’t run into that name before. I learned through the documentation available that he had served in Roswell and more importantly, had shared an office with Jesse Marcel.

What I hadn’t mentioned in that earlier post but did during the show, was that the diary, that had been the focus of a documentary a few years back, which wasn’t written by Marcel based on a handwriting analysis, might well have been written by Smith. It was in a “Memorandum” booklet that was everywhere in the Army as one point. Tens of thousands of them had been issued for taking notes. It is possible that when Marcel was reassigned and took his person possessions with him, had picked up the diary that Smith had been keeping… or when Smith left, he didn’t take the diary with him so that Marcel ended up with it.

None of that really matters because there was nothing in the diary about the UFO found near Corona in 1947. Not even a reference to the “official answer” of weather balloon. It was an interesting but irrelevant document.

And speaking of documents, I asked Tom about his opinion of the Ramey Memo. Tom said that the first time he had projected the memo in an enlarged fashion, he saw the critical term, “victims of the wreck.” That reading is not universal and there are other interpretations of it that do not lead to the extraterrestrial.

There were other questions I wanted to ask but we ran out of time. We could have talked about MJ-12 and the Alien Autopsy, for example. Next week, however, I’ll be talking with John Shirley who has a more skeptical approach to the subject of UFOs.

Roswell Intelligence Officer Dalton Smith

 

I have been asked many times if there is anything else we can learn about the Roswell UFO crash now that the first-hand witnesses are no longer available. We are now talking with the second and third hand witnesses, meaning the children and grandchildren of those who were there. As the stories become farther removed from the original, there are distortions that develop through no fault of those telling them. It makes it more difficult to get at the truth.

However, to my surprise, sometimes things happen to suggest there are some important avenues that we can follow. Just this last week, I received an email asking that if I had ever heard of Dalton Smith. According to the email, Smith was an intelligence officer who had been assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in Roswell in 1947. The correspondent wanted to know if that was true, or more precisely, what I knew about Smith.

The late Dalton Smith

In all the years of research, Smith’s name had never come up. In the discussions with those who had been there including the counterintelligence soldiers assigned, no one had mentioned him. We knew of James Breece who had died long before we began our research, but nothing about Smith.

The first place to look was the index for the 509^th Yearbook. George Eberhart had created the index decades ago and for those interested, it is only good for my copy of the Yearbook. I had all the pages that had information and photographs of those assigned to the base but the numbering didn’t include some of the other pages that were, more or less, irrelevant. So, if you attempt to apply that index to other copies, it just won’t match. But I digress.

Smith’s name was not among those in the Yearbook. Walter Haut, who created the Yearbook told me that some 10 to 20 percent of the personnel assigned to the base were not in the book. Next stop was the base telephone directory. I quickly found Major Dalton Smith listed with a telephone number of 312.

On the same page and not far from Smith’s name was that of Jesse Marcel and Marcel’s telephone number was 312. That meant that Smith had shared an office and a telephone with Marcel, which put him right in the middle of the activity in 1947.

Given that, I knew that Breece was assigned to the intelligence section, but his telephone number was 459. Breece was not in the same office as Marcel. Given that I’d discovered that Smith and Marcel shared a telephone, I wondered if I could find a similar pairing with Breece. I didn’t find another person who shared his telephone but did find that he was located in Building 31, as were Marcel and Smith.

Under Intelligence Officer in that phone book, I learned that the base S-2 (Intelligence) number was 312, which would be Marcel. The Security Office was 316, Combat Intelligence (Breece) was 459, and the Historical Office was 312.

I also learned that Building 31 was apparently assigned to the 715^th Bomb Squadron and housed its Operations, Communications and Personal Equipment offices as well as the base Intelligence Office. It does strike me as strange that the base Intelligence Office is found in a building assigned to a specific squadron, but it’s probably not overly significant.

There is little more to be said about this. I did learn that at the time Smith retired from the Air Force, he was Chief of Staff for Air Force Intelligence at the Pentagon. He left the military after more than 23 years of continuous active duty including World War II, in which he served in Europe and North Africa. Among numerous decorations, he received the Bronze Star Medal, the European-African-Middle East Medal with twelve bronze service stars, and the Korean Service Medal. At one point, he was Deputy for Intelligence in the Far East Air Force Bomber Command in Japan.

When Colonel Smith retired in 1964, the Director of Administrative Services of the U.S. Air Force cited his "sound judgment and high professional ability" during "a long and honorable career."

All of this does verify his service. The telephone directory verifies his position in Roswell at that critical time. There are a few additional leads to follow now. I’ll see what I can learn but I fear I learned all this too late. Smith died in 2013. Had we only known.