Roswell and the Dog that Didn't Bark

Here’s an interesting revelation. I was watching the recent Unsolved Mysteries report on the Roswell case and Colonel Richard Weaver said something that caught my attention. He was talking about having reviewed a million documents and files and miles of microfilm during his review of the Roswell case. The implication is that they, meaning he and his team, had made a Herculean effort to find evidence and failed do it. His conclusion, based on his investigation, was the correct conclusion but it wasn’t accurate.

Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I had done the same thing, and I could name a couple of dozen others who had followed leads, researched specific aspects of the Roswell case and in the end, there was limited documentation mainly in the form of newspaper stories and the testimony of hundreds of people who had first or second-hand observations. In other words, the documentation was limited, the testimonies were called anecdotal, and we all had searched for documentation and other testimony for nearly forty years for it.

And then I had a thought. I had made a comprehensive search for mention of Roswell and documents relating to it in what could be considered the microcosm of Weaver’s world and search, of Project Blue Book. Although it had officially begun as Project Sign in January 1948, its records begin earlier, even with sightings that pre-dated the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. In fact, the earliest dated case in the Blue Book files is from June 2. When you look at the record of sightings for July 1947, they cover a single-spaced page. The military was investigating what was happening during the summer that preceded the creation of the official investigation in 1948.

When the Army announced, on July 8, 1947, that they had found a flying saucer, it was international news. I will say that nearly every newspaper in the United States covered the story in some form, beginning with the early announcement on the afternoon of July 8 and ending the next day when Brigadier General Roger Ramey announced it was just a weather balloon. Pictures of Ramey, his chief of staff, Colonel Thomas Dubose, and Major Jesse Marcel, holding pieces of the weather balloon, were printed in the newspapers the next day.

BG Roger Ramey and COL Thomas Dubose with
the balloon wreckage that served as a
cover for the real wreckage.

There are stories of crashed UFOs in the Blue Book files in July 1947. The solutions, all legitimate, ranged from advertising gimmicks to small saucers created to fool friends. A report, from Shreveport, Louisiana, even came to the attention of then FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. That caused us a great deal of aggravation as we tried to reconcile a note written on an FBI document by Hoover with that report. It had nothing to do with the Roswell case. The file for that case, dated July 7, 1947, is quite thick. And no, I believe the military was correct in labeling it a hoax.

The point here is that by July 8, the military was gathering sighting reports and there are 47 cases for the month in what are now the Blue Book files. There are alleged crashes, files that are labeled as “Folders,” because of the thickness of the file, and many in which there is a notation for a report but labeled as “case missing.”

What I noticed is several crash reports, comprehensive investigations, and an apparent real effort to determine what was going on. All this happening with the “high profile” cases that were extensively investigated and not a single file dedicated to the Roswell case. Here was the story that probably generated some of the highest interest around the world and there is no file on it. The only reference I can find in the Blue Book files is the third paragraph of a four-paragraph story that mentions, in passing, that the officers at Roswell had received a “blistering rebuke” for their claim they had a flying disk.

Colonel Weaver had access to a great deal more official information than any of the civilian researchers and said that he found nothing. I say, I looked through the Blue Book files, which I’m sure were reviewed by Weaver’s team, and they found nothing there either. It made me wonder why a great deal of effort was expended investigating many reports from July 1947, but there is no reference to what could be called the most important story from July 1947. A single mention in a newspaper clipping buried in another Blue Book file but nothing that referenced Roswell specifically.

Doesn’t my search, of the Blue Book files, mirror the research done in the 1990s by the Air Force? There should have been a rather thick file on the Roswell case that included not only newspaper clippings, but the pictures of three of the principals in that case. True, the balloon explanation was floated (pun intended) within about three hours of the initial story, but it was a story of international interest. Walter Haut, the Public Information Officer in Roswell at the time, told me that he received telephone calls from around the world.

Walter Haut being interviewed.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

But there is nothing in the files except that one paragraph in a newspaper clipping. I did ask Haut about that blistering rebuke and he told me that it never happened. His words were something to the effect that if he’d been called by the Pentagon and chewed out, he would remember it.

Again, my point is that a search of the Blue Book files, which were dedicated to gathering UFO information, has nothing about Roswell. It was a case filled with military officers which means it was originally reported officially, but there is no file. Why the emphasis on other reports of crashes and other generic sightings but nothing on what was the biggest UFO story for two days in July? Sure, had it been included in Blue Book, it would have been labeled as a balloon, but that isn’t there. Nothing…

Just as Colonel Weaver found with his inside sources, high-level security clearance and his orders that came, virtually, from the Secretary of the Air Force, no documents relating to Roswell, I found nothing in the declassified Blue Book files. It should have been there, but it was not.

One final comment about all this. For those who would argue that the secrecy was to protect Project Mogul, I point to the newspapers, especially the Alamogordo News, on July 10. There was a long article about the balloon project being carried out at the Alamogordo Army Air Field. Pictures showed a Mogul array (and no, they didn’t call it a Mogul array in the article), explained what they were doing and what it all meant. Charles Moore, one of those working on the project told me that he had bought the ladder that was featured in one of the pictures.

Alamogordo News with pictures of a Constant Level Balloon launch, which
is a Project Mogul balloon launch published on July 10, 1947.

This means, of course, that what was happening in Alamogordo was not highly classified. The balloon launches were conducted by the civilians from the University of New York attempting to create what they called a Constant Level Balloon, meaning it would remain at a certain altitude. Although offered as the solution in 1947, it did not explain what had been found. I have already, many times, explained this about the Mogul solution, the one that the Air Force used to solve the mystery of what fell decades after the fact.

I found Colonel Weaver’s comment on the Unsolved Mysteries show quite telling. There should have been specific documentation that lead to the constant level balloons but not back to Project Mogul. The search would have ended with the balloons from Alamogordo. By the mid-1990s, Mogul was no longer a secret, and several UFO researchers were aware of it. We all had been talking about it for years before the Air Force came up with it as the solution for the Roswell case.

Weaver’s comment, about finding nothing is quite telling. The significant fact, as Sherlock Holmes said in the murder case he was investigating, was that the dog didn’t bark. The significance fact here is as Weaver said he found nothing about the Roswell case in all those files both classified and unclassified. This lack of results screams the problem, because there should have been something given the impact of the original news release and widespread interest in the tale. You might say that this is another example of the dog not barking. *

 

*I thought a note of explanation might be necessary for those who haven’t read the Holmes story. There was a murder committed, and Holmes was investigating. All thought it might be a stranger, but Holmes said that the watch dog didn’t bark. It meant that the murder was someone the dog knew, so it didn’t bark.

Roswell, Sheridan Cavitt and Project Mogul

 

As I mentioned on Coast-to-Coast AM recently, I found another of those one-off UFO magazines that attempts to capitalize on the interest in alien visitation. I looked at the Roswell entry and noticed they mentioned the Project Mogul nonsense. I have covered this at length on this blog and in my recent books about the Roswell crash/retrieval. I’ll make one quick point here. Well, maybe two…

First, Flight No. 4, listed as the culprit here, that is, this flight was the one that allegedly scattered the debris for Mack Brazel to find was not launched. The documentation tells us that the flight was canceled. I do not understand how this documentation can be overlooked. If the flight didn’t fly, it did not scatter the debris.

There is a second point. According to what Charles Moore, one of the engineers who worked on the project back in 1947, told me, Flight No. 4, was configured just like Flight No. 5. While there is no schematic for Flight No. 4 (reinforcing the idea that it didn’t fly), we have the schematic for Flight No. 5, courtesy of the Air Force investigation of the Roswell case. There were no rawin radar targets on that flight, which raises the question, “Where did the rawin target photographed in General Ramey’s office originate?” It certainly didn’t come from Roswell.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data at the school
library in Socorro. Photo by Kevin randle

Second, the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer in Roswell at the time, carries great weight. However, what Cavitt told Don Schmitt and me when we met him, he wasn’t even in Roswell at the time. Later, he would tell Don and me, that he was too busy with security investigations to be chasing weather balloons.

I did ask him, given that the description of the officer who accompanied Jesse Marcel, Sr. out to the debris, meaning he was a West Texas boy who could ride horses, about his denial. He said that it sounded like him, but he insisted that he had not gone to the debris field.

Now, this could be boiled down to me spreading tales, but there is documentation about this. In the Air Force report, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Cavitt’s interview conducted by Colonel Richard Weaver is published. Weaver asked about the incident that happened during the early part of July. Cavitt responded:

We went out to this site. There were no, as I understand, check points or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil… I do not remember if Marcel was there or not on the site. He could have been. We took it back to the intelligence room… in the CIC office.

RW: What did you think it was when you recovered it?

SC: I thought it was a weather balloon.

I always wonder why, if Cavitt had identified the material while still on the ranch, he hadn’t communicated this rather important piece of intelligence to Colonel Blanchard and saved him the embarrassment of telling the world they had recovered a flying saucer… but I digress.

I have a letter, written by Cavitt to Doyle Rees, one time officer in charge of the CIC office in Albuquerque, on December 6, 1989. He was answering a letter from Rees, which I think was generated by the original Unsolved Mysteries show on Roswell that had aired several weeks earlier. I think this because that show is mentioned in the letter.

In the letter, Cavitt wrote, “…Marcel was a smart man; a good friend, a Louisiana Cajun, who was prone to be excitable, and, in this case wrong in that Cavitt had been along on that caper.”

Sheridan Cavitt interview in Arizona with Kevin Randle and
Don Schmitt. Photo by Kevin Randle

I don’t know why Cavitt would lie to Rees, unless had not been the senior officer of the CIC in the area at the time, and therefore, hadn’t been read into the crash when he, Rees, arrived in Albuquerque. The point is that Cavitt told fellow CIC officer, Rees, he hadn’t been there, but then told Weaver that not only was he there, he recognized the debris as that from a weather balloon…

Of course, that still doesn’t explain the picture of the rawin target taken in Ramey’s office, that was published on July 9, 1947, for all the world to see. Where did that debris originate?

Roger Ramey and Thomas DuBose with the remains of a rawin target. Since there
were no rawin targets on the early flights of Mogul balloons, the question
 is where did the rawin originate?

But, of course, that’s fine because we all know that it was really part of Project Mogul…

(Blogger’s Note: For those interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Project Mogul explanation, I recommend Roswell in the 21^st Century. This provides more evidence that Project Mogul was not a part of this story until injected into it in the late 1980s.)

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Colonel Richard Weaver and the Roswell Report

For years Colonel Richard Weaver has been seen as the villain in the Roswell UFO crash tale. He was the man in charge of the Air Force investigation that culminated in that huge report that contained so much information. He was the guest on the latest edition of the A Different Perspective radio show/podcast. You can listen to both hours here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41931979

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41932179

Colonel Richard Weaver... Incognito.

We began with a discussion of the process that ended up with his assignment for the Air Force, and then in the details of how the investigation was conducted. For those interested in the way this manipulated by those working through Congressman Schiff, it is eye opening. You can read the details in his book found at:

https://www.amazon.com/Backstory-Roswell-Exclusive-Disclosures-Inquiry-ebook/dp/B08GY9WXCL/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Colonel+Richard+Weaver+Backstory&qid=1605299084&sr=8-2

Although we did discuss the role that Karl Pflock played in getting Schiff to request the GAO investigation, it wasn’t the most important part of the show. Pflock, at least according to Rich, was maneuvering behind the scenes, attempting to improve his status and interest a publisher in a book deal. In fact, according to a letter that Pflock had sent to retired AFOSI agent Sheridan Cavitt, he was looking to make some money out of the deal.

We did analyze the role that Jesse Marcel played in the whole Roswell case. There are some points in Marcel’s claims, not about Roswell but about his military career, that are worrisome. Part of the trouble, I suspect, came from the notes of Bob Pratt’s 1978 interview with Marcel and the way that Pratt transcribed the tape. You can read that interview here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/jesse-marcel-sr-bob-pratt-and-interview.html

We touched on the claim that Marcel had shot down five enemy aircraft during WWII. Rich pointed out that there were records of soldiers who were gunners in aircraft who had shot down enough enemy to become “aces,” but Marcel wasn’t among them. I thought the claim might have been confused by Marcel’s claim of five Air Medals… I, and Rich, could only document two.

Captain Jesse Marcel (at the map board) briefing flight crews in the
South Pacific during the Second World War.

We also looked at the press conference held in General Ramey’s office once Marcel had brought material from Roswell to Fort Worth. I had interview Irving Newton in 1990 about his role in explaining the debris. Clearly, what is seen in the photographs is debris from a weather balloon and a rawin radar reflector. But I didn’t mention the interview that Don Schmitt had with retired Brigadier General Thomas DuBose who was also in the office. He said that the debris on the floor was not the same as the debris that had been brought from Roswell. You can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/07/thomas-dubose-and-switched-roswell.html

This, of course, lead, indirectly to a discussion of Project Mogul. Rich believes that it is a viable explanation for the debris found by rancher Mack Brazel. I do not. I’ve covered the reasons several times and you can read them here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/07/thomas-dubose-and-switched-roswell.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/02/national-geographics-and-ufos.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-project-mogul-double-standard.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-few-facts-about-project-mogul.html

And, since it is fun to show both sides of a tale, I will note that Tim Printy, at his website had this to say about Mogul:

http://www.astronomyufo.com/UFO/flight4.htm

And, it wouldn’t have been a well rounded two hours had we not discussed MJ-12. Here we both are on the same page. Rich provided the Air Force reasons for not accepting MJ-12 as a legitimate set of documents and I explained what I believe is the fatal flaw in the documents. You can read more about that here:

These are some of the highlights of the shows. There is much more about the Roswell case and the Air Force investigation into those events. I keep thinking of things to add. For example, we discussed the Ramey Memo, and the fact that the high-powered lab used by the Air Force to attempt to read anything on it failed, when a kid with a magnifying glass can pick out five or six words. There is a great deal of inside information in those shows and anyone interested in Roswell, regardless of which came in which they reside, will find something of interest.

Next up is William Puckett who hosts a website that publishes current UFO sightings as well as dealing with other aspects of the UFO phenomena. 

The "Harassed Rancher" Roswell Article

Over at UFO Conjectures, hosted by Rich Reynolds, he reproduces the July 9, 1947, newspaper, article from the Roswell Daily Record, “Harassed Rancher Who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It,” suggesting that this is the final nail in the Roswell coffin. But I say, “Not so fast.” There are some disturbing things in that article, things that make no sense when you think about them.

According to the article, “Brazel related that on June 14 he and an 8-year-old son, Vernon were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up on [sic] rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather rough paper and sticks.”

Okay, there is nothing extraordinary here and it sounds for all the world like the remnants of one of the Mogul balloon arrays that were being launched in June and July from Alamogordo. The article also suggests that “on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter Betty [actually Bessie], age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris.”

I’ll just overlook the fact that this seems to be a strange thing to have done on July 4, rather than say, June 15, or July 3. I’ll just move on.

Brazel, then on July 7, according to the Daily Record, visited with Sheriff George Wilcox and mentioned he might have had found one of the flying disks. Wilcox called out to the air base and eventually Jesse Marcel “and a man in plain clothes [Sheridan Cavitt]” arrived and they all, meaning Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt drove to the ranch. They gathered up the rest of it and “…tried to make a kite out of it but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.”

Now we get a few specifics about size of this debris. He didn’t see it fall or before it was torn up, “so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he though it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long… The rubber was smoky gray and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.”

We learn, “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and the sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.”

According to the newspaper there were no words to be found, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed on it had been used in the construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment had been used.

Before we look at the final two paragraphs of the article, which do have some relevance, let’s talk about what we know here. If Brazel went to the Sheriff’s Office on Monday, and if, as Marcel said, he was eating lunch when he got the call, then we know that all this took place in the afternoon. According to the best information available, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt didn’t leave Roswell until late afternoon, maybe as late as four or four-thirty, and if the drive to the ranch took three hours (which is the time it takes on the modern roads today) then the questions become, “When did they gather the material, where did they take it to attempt to put it together, and how did Marcel get back to Roswell in time to meet with Colonel William Blanchard, the base commander by 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 8?” The timing simply doesn’t work because they would have arrived at the ranch about dusk and couldn’t have gathered the material in the dark and do the other things suggested by the newspaper, not to mention that the debris had already been gathered.

But let’s back up even a little more. Bill Brazel said that his father had taken some of the debris into town to show the sheriff. If this is true, and the material that Mack Brazel had found was as described in the newspaper, why did Marcel and Cavitt drive out to the ranch? Wouldn’t one of them, if not both of them, recognize the debris as mundane? Why go to the ranch at all? Brazel, along with family members, had apparently collected it all on July 4, again according to the newspaper. There was nothing to see in the field, and since there were samples of it in the Sheriff’s Office, there was no need to drive to the ranch to see what would have been an empty field.

If we believe this article, neither Marcel nor Cavitt recognized the material that Brazel brought into town. Cavitt, on the other hand, told Colonel Richard Weaver that he had recognized the debris in the field as a balloon as soon as he saw it laying out there. He didn’t explain why he hadn’t bothered to mention this to Marcel at the time or to Blanchard when he got back to Roswell.

If we look at the descriptions about the amount of material, there doesn’t seem to be all that much. Not a field filled with debris, but a small area that had been cleaned by the Brazel family. There was absolutely no reason to pursue this any further. There wasn’t a problem with who would clean it up because the family had already done that. In fact, at one time Bessie Brazel claimed that they had collected it all into three or four burlap bags and stored it under the porch of the ranch house.

The debris displayed in General Ramey's

office, July 8, 1947.

Had this been a Mogul array, there would have been evidence of more than a single balloon; there would have been multiple rawin targets (if you follow the illustration for Flight No. 2, but Flight No. 5 had no rawin targets), lots of cord to link it all, and given the size of the arrays, they probably would have been spread out over more than 200 yards. The descriptions given in the newspaper (and the photographs taken in Fort Worth) were more consistent with a single balloon and a single rawin, not a complete array with multiple balloons and multiple rawins.

When we get to the last two paragraphs, more trouble develops. Brazel said, according to the newspaper, that he had found two weather-observation balloons on the ranch but what he had found didn’t resemble them. He said, “I’m sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Of course, had it been Mogul, this was technically accurate because the function of Mogul was not weather observation. But, the Mogul arrays were made up of neoprene weather balloons and possibly some rawin radar targets, cord linking all the balloons together in a long line, sonobuoys to detect the sounds of detonation of atomic bombs, and devices to attempt to keep the balloons aloft. These would “dribble” out the sand of the ballast as the balloons began to descend.

The point is that if we read the article, it raises more questions than it answers, suggests that there was no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to drive to the ranch, suggests a time line that is impossible given the timing and the distances, provides a description of a single balloon and single target, exactly what appears in the photographs taken in General Roger Ramey’s office on the afternoon of July 8.

In other words, there is actually nothing in this article that eliminates any of the answers for the Roswell crash including both Mogul and the alien, and nothing in it to support any of the answers. It is a self-contradictory document that obscures more than it reveals. As evidence, it does nothing for either side of the argument. While skeptics can point to the description of the debris and say that it is a balloon the believers can point to the last two paragraphs and say that Brazel would have recognized the debris as a balloon had that been what it was. This is just another of the inexplicable items that pop up in this tale.

The CIA and the Ramey Memo

Since it has come up in the discussions here a couple of times, I thought I would identify that high-power government lab that was supposedly involved in an effort to decrypt the Ramey Memo. According to Colonel Richard Weaver, who answered my question about it without reservation, it was the National Photographic Interpretation Center which was part of the CIA back in 1994. I filed a FOIA request with them and received a fairly rapid response.

I told them that I was requesting information, documentation or anything relating to an examination of a photograph taken of General Ramey in July 1947, and that had been submitted to them for analysis by the Air Force in 1994. They responded writing, “This is a final response to your 17 January 2015 Freedom of Information (FOIA) request, received in the office of the Information and Privacy Coordinator for ‘information on an examination of a photograph taken on July 8, 1947, submitted to the National Photographic Interpretation Center (now National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) by the Secretary of the Air Force Office (Colonel Richard Weaver) in 1994.’”

They let me know that the CIA is not the repository for records of other government agencies, which, of course, I already knew. The request had gone to them because the National Photographic Interpretation Center had been part of the CIA at the time. By the time I filed my request it had become the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and fell under the auspices of the Air Force. The CIA supplied the names of the FOIA program managers at both the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and for the Air Force. Good information and helpful and I, of course, filed the requests on the day I received the letter from the CIA.

But then the CIA had to get snarky. They wrote, or rather John Giuffrida, who was the acting information and privacy coordinator wrote that “For your information, the CIA was not created until September 1947 [emphasis in original] and material prior to that date would be contained in the records of the Office of Strategic Services and other predecessor organizations of the CIA.”

All well and good, but I wasn’t asking about something that had taken place in 1947, but had occurred in 1994. The parent organization of the National Photographic Interpretation Center was the CIA. Had I wanted information that preceded the creation of the CIA, I would have communicated with the National Archives, but I would have also asked the CIA because September 1947 was a reorganization of the intelligence community and not the creation of a brand new organization.

Anyway, I did send a request to the Air Force and received a quick response from them, handing me off to another organization. The FOIA manager, who is not identified, wrote, “…we are not the correct office to submit your request.”

And I sent a request to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and received a quick response from them. They wrote, “Our extensive search of National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency records failed to identify any documents in our files that are responsive to your request.”

What does all this mean?

Not much really. I suspect that the attempt to read the Ramey Memo was a just part of the exercise and that the Air Force had expected the results they received. I don’t believe much of an attempt was made to read the memo, that someone might have looked at it with a magnifying glass or under some form of magnification. But rather than guess at their mission, here is what they say that they do:

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has a responsibility to provide the products and services that decision makers, warfighters, and first responders need, when they need it most. As a member of the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense, NGA supports a unique mission set. We are committed to acquiring, developing and maintaining the proper technology, people and processes that will enable overall mission success.

Geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT is the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. GEOINT consists of imagery, imagery intelligence and geospatial information.

Department of Defense and government customers with CAC cards should go to https://www1.geoint.nga.mil.  First time users must first register their PKI/CAC credentials with NGA. 

 Go to: https://pki.geo.nga.mil/servlet/RegistrationForm.  You have to fill out who you are, command, supervisor (name/phone/email), and security officer (name/phone/email).  When submited, [sic] the registration request is sent to your supervisor and security officer for approval then to NGA to be registered.  Once registered, you'll be able to access our NIPR site and have access to NGA products and services.

Or, in other words, they aren’t in the business in attempting to read an obscure document from more than a half century ago. Their mission has a more timely and real world component and I suspect that the Air Force submitted the material to them so they could claim due diligence. The Air Force could say that “we used a high-powered lab and they were unable to read the memo.”

What does this mean?

Probably one of two things, neither of them important. First the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency didn’t spend a lot of time trying to read the memo. Someone may have looked at it, couldn’t make out much and quit. They told the Air Force they couldn’t read it which made the Air Force happy, and that was the end of it.

Second, I don’t view this as a cover up but as one governmental agency asking another if they can help and in the end the second agency said, “No.” It wasn’t their job to decipher cryptic notes on a piece of photographic film from a half century earlier. The Air Force could report the failure and move onto other things.

Of course, I made the rounds, going from the CIA which was originally the parent organization of the National Photographic Interpretation Center to the Air Force and then to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and never did get a good answer. They only told me that they had no records, and given the nature of the request from the Air Force, I don’t find that strange.

The point is that I was given the name of that high-power lab by the man who would have known, made the FOIA requests, got a typical run around, and have nowhere else to go. I could appeal, but what will they say? “Well, we looked again, even harder this time but we could find no documents responsive to your request.”

Now everyone knows the name of the lab and a little of the history that goes with it. There really is nothing of importance here, other than we did attempt to find any documentation but in the big bureaucracy that is the US government, you need a really big shovel to sift through all the crap.

Who Told Walter Haut about the Debris Field?

Since this debate about the press release has gained a little traction here, I thought I’d add a few facts and perspective to see if we can’t reach some sort of a reasonable conclusion. We do have a great deal of information and while some of it is in dispute, there are aspects of it on which we all seem to agree.

Given the testimony we have and the articles that appeared in the newspapers of

Jesse Marcel, Sr.

the time, it seems that Major Jesse Marcel, Sr. and Captain Sheridan Cavitt followed Mack Brazel out to the ranch sometime on Sunday July 6. Marcel, in his interview with Linda Corley suggested they had left in the early afternoon, but I think it was more likely they headed out later in the day. In today’s world, it takes about three hours to drive from Roswell to the ranch. In 1947 the roads wouldn’t have been quite so good and the route might not have been quite so direct. It might have taken four or five hours. With sunset coming sometime around 9:00 p.m., and Marcel’s suggestion they arrived about dusk, it seems they might not have left Roswell much before four in the afternoon.

There is also a question of where they stayed the night. We had heard that it was the “Hinds” house which in the 1990s was a one-room shack that was used to store hay. It was some five or six miles from the actual debris field. If, on the other had they stayed at the ranch house (which, I believe had been, at the very least, remodeled in the 1980s or so) then they were some fifteen or twenty miles from the debris field.

The Hinds house near the Debris Field.

Marcel said that they had cold beans and crackers for dinner. He said nothing about the time they might have gotten up the next morning which is July 7. We know, ironically, based on the Mogul records that sunrise was about five and in similar circumstances, meaning outside my comfort zone, that I would have awakened about dawn. Marcel said nothing about breakfast, what time they got up, or what they did before they went out to look at the debris field.

Given all this, I would suspect that they arrived at the field no earlier than eight, but hell, that’s a wild ass guess. If I was Marcel or Cavitt, I’d want to get home as quickly as possible, so the earlier, the better. As I said in another post, Brazel saddled two horses and he and Cavitt rode out while Marcel drove his car. If they were at the Hines house, the travel time might have been thirty to sixty minutes. If they were farther north, at the location of the ranch house, travel time could have been longer. No one asked about that and there is no one to ask in the world today. All we can do is guess based on other timing.

Bill Brazel showing us the Debris Field

Marcel said that the debris field was three-quarters to a mile long and a couple of hundred feet wide. Bill Brazel, when he took us out to the field showed us basically where it started and where it ended. We later measured that at about a mile long. This was based on what Brazel said was the length of the gouge, which is a detail that Marcel never mentioned.

We have no idea how long they spent on the field. Cavitt told Colonel Richard Weaver that he recognized the debris as the remains of a weather balloon

An older Sheridan Cavitt.

immediately, but no one asked Cavitt why he hadn’t mentioned that to either Marcel or to Blanchard. (I will note here that according to what Cavitt told me, he hadn’t been there… this was after he had given his interview to Weaver.) Anyway, Marcel eventually told Cavitt to head on back to the base. He stayed, and according to what Marcel told Corley, stuffed his car with the debris, which, of course, suggests something more than a weather balloon.

As I’ve said, I don’t understand how they could have spent more than an hour or so at the field, but if they were walking the whole thing to make sure they saw everything around there, it might have taken longer. I have no idea how long it might have taken Marcel to load his car, and we have no information if they had eaten breakfast. I mention this simply because if Marcel, on his way home, stopped for lunch, then that adds time to the trip. Again, according to what Marcel told Corley, he got home late, but we don’t know exactly what that means either. All we really know is that Marcel did not go out to the base that night. He went in the next morning, that is, July 8.

So now we come to the point of this long recap. How did Walter Haut learn about the debris recovery? Haut said that Blanchard had called him and either dictated the press release to him or gave him the major points and Haut wrote it. Marcel

Walter Haut

said that they had an “eager beaver” press officer which tells us nothing about how Haut learned about the recovery or if he made a habit of issuing press releases on his own.

Here are a few facts that are new. Based on information in the Roswell airfield telephone directory, I know that Blanchard’s office was in building 810. Marcel had his office in building 31 and Haut’s office was in building 82. What this means is that Haut wouldn’t have run into Marcel in the hallway or near a coffeepot as they came to work or went about their duties. There is no evidence that they would have mingled in a professional sense other than both would have been in attendance at the staff meetings but Marcel would have been considered a member of the primary staff and Haut on the secondary. That means Haut’s job was not essential to the main operation of the bomb group but that Marcel’s was.

So again the question that must be asked is, “How did Haut learn about the recovery?”

And the only answer that works is that Blanchard told him. Cavitt, as the counterintelligence guy would not have wanted to talk to the PIO, nor would he want to be associated with any sort of investigation that would call attention to him, his subordinates or his duties. In fact, in 1947, even his rank was classified so that no one knew what rank any of the counterintelligence guys held or as Cavitt said to me, “You didn’t really want anyone to know that a sergeant was investigating a colonel so our ranks were classified. No one knew what rank we were.” The exception to that would have been Blanchard and some of the senior officers but not many.

Although Marcel lived on the same street as Haut, their houses were a few blocks apart and it seems they didn’t socialize that much. Since they worked in separate buildings, there is very little chance that they ran into each other on the morning of July 8 so that Marcel could tell Haut that he had picked up the debris. Even if they had met, it is unlikely that the topic would have come up. Marcel would have been reluctant to talk about it given the nature of his job. If you had no need to know, then you were outside the loop.

That leaves us with Blanchard. Haut told us that Blanchard called him and told him to issue the press release. Blanchard was the one to make that decision and Blanchard was the only one who had the information and the contact with Haut. There were only three people who knew about the recovery (and I exclude Brazel here because on that morning he was still at the ranch) and two of them wouldn’t have said a word about it to Haut if for no other reason than they wouldn’t have seen him that morning.

I think that we can now end the discussion of who authorized the press release. Without Blanchard telling Haut about the recovery and providing details, Haut wouldn’t have had the information. If Blanchard gave him the information, then it was a tacit approval of the press release. If Blanchard had not dictated it to him but only gave him the basic information, Haut could easily have called back to read him the final draft but, no matter how you slice it, Blanchard is the common denominator here.

I can see no other way, given the facts, which Haut would have learned about the recovery. He could not decide on his own to write the story because he didn’t know about it. He was given the information by Blanchard and told to issue the press release. This should stop the endless speculation about Haut issuing the release on his own.

(Note: All pictures copyright by Randle except those of Marcel and Haut.)

Colonel Blanchard and the Roswell Press Release

I’ve been thinking about this press release issued by Colonel Blanchard that has the skeptics in such turmoil and I must confess worries me a bit as well. There just doesn’t seem to be any logic in it if we start with the premise that they thought they were finding parts of an alien spacecraft on the debris field.

But as I was driving across Nebraska, which is fairly boring, I got to thinking about this and what the press release actually said. The terminology is important and the lack of any real detail is also important. If we look at what was said about what was found on the ranch managed by Mack Brazel and what was seen by Jesse Marcel, Sr. and Sheridan Cavitt, we might be able to figure some of this out.

For those unfamiliar with what the press release said, this is the Associated Press version based on the information supplied by Walter Haut:

Roswell, N.M. – The army air forces here today announced a flying disc had been found on a ranch near Roswell and is in army possession.

The Intelligence office reports that it gained possession of the ‘Dis:’ [sic] through the cooperation of a Roswell rancher and Sheriff George Wilson [sic] of Roswell.

The disc landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher, whose name has not yet been obtained, stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the Roswell sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s office notified a major of the 509^th Intelligence Office.

Action was taken immediately and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home and taken to the Roswell Air Base. Following examination, the disc was flown by intelligence officers in a superfortress (B-29) to an undisclosed “Higher Headquarters.”

The air base has refused to give details of construction of the disc or its appearance.

Residents near the ranch on which the disc was found reported seeing a strange blue light several days ago about three o’clock in the morning.

According to the best evidence available today, Brazel found a field that was covered in metallic debris a few days before heading into Roswell. He provided almost no descriptions of it but did want to know who was going to clean up the mess. Tommy Tyree, a sometimes ranch hand working for Brazel, explained that the material was so tightly packed that the sheep refused to cross it but that doesn’t tell us much about the density. All we know is that the material, and I’ll guess some of it stirring in the wind, frightened the sheep. There was enough of it to make it a chore to collect. Jesse Marcel, Sr., would later suggest that it was an area that was about three quarters of a mile long and a couple of hundred feet wide. Bill Brazel would talk about a gouge through the center of the area that was a half mile or so long which tells us nothing about the amount of debris but does suggest something about the length of the debris field.

We know, based on the records, that Brazel did drive into Roswell to talk with the sheriff and that the sheriff contacted the Roswell Army Air Field. Jesse Marcel, along with Sheridan Cavitt accompanied Brazel back to the ranch, arriving late in the day. It was too late that night to go out to the field, so they made that trip the next morning according to Marcel. Cavitt, according to what he told Colonel Richard Weaver, went out with Bill Rickett, his NCOIC, and thought that Marcel might have gone out with them (and it is here we see some of the trouble with memories that are decades old).

Marcel said that he, Cavitt and Brazel went out the next morning and gathered some of the debris. Marcel said that he told Cavitt to head back to the base and he would stay, though I don’t know why he would have done that. Marcel said that he filled his car with the debris and that he then drove back to Roswell.

And here we encounter the beginnings of the real problems. Even if Marcel moved slowly, it shouldn’t have taken no more than an hour to fill his car, and even if he drove slowly back to Roswell, it shouldn’t have taken no more than four or five hours, which would seem to put him in town in the early evening at the latest. Which, of course, suggests that he didn’t have to wake up his wife and son to show them the debris, which, according to Jesse Marcel, Jr., his father called a “flying saucer.” He might have stopped at the house to show them what he had found because it was parts of what he thought of as a flying saucer and for that reason it was mildly interesting. Flying saucer didn’t necessarily mean alien spacecraft at the time, though that was certainly one of the interpretations, one of the least likely of the interpretations, given the tone of most newspaper and radio reports.

The Circleville Flying Saucer

Now, here is what I’m thinking about this. On July 6, 1947, newspapers around the country carried the story of a flying disk recovered in the Circleville, Ohio area by a farmer, Sherman Campbell. Pictures of it were published in the newspapers, including one with Campbell’s daughter holding up what are clearly parts of a rawin radar reflector. Campbell identified it as did the local sheriff and newspaper reporters. Campbell though if it was high aloft with the wind causing the reflective surface to spin, it might look like a disk from the ground.

I don’t know if they saw or heard this story in the Roswell area, but it was national news and it certainly offered a plausible answer for some of the flying saucer/flying disk reports. Some sort of strange metallic debris with a nearly intact radar target had been found in Ohio. This might have suggested something to Blanchard.

So Marcel shows up early the next morning (which in the military wouldn’t have been all that early when you remember that flight operations as well as other tasks might start at four or five in the morning) and I would guess somewhere around seven or seven-thirty. According to what he would later say, and given the descriptions of the material recovered provided by Bill Brazel, Loretta Proctor, Bud Payne and Tommy Tyree, there wasn’t much in the way of diversity. They had some light weight wood that had the density of balsa, some wires that Bill Brazel suggested were like monofilament fishing line but that would transmit light, some foil and some parchment. Nothing to suggest an alien spacecraft, only some materials that were sort of familiar but a little bit different and nothing that would suggest any sort of identification. Besides all that, we have Cavitt telling Weaver that it was all a balloon (though Cavitt told me personally in 1991 that he had been too busy in July 1947 to go chasing balloons).

Blanchard probably (and note the qualification) looked at the debris, thought it nothing all that extraordinary but would be something that might be associated with the flying saucer stories. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing classified about the material. They hadn’t found a craft. They hadn’t found bodies. There was nothing to suggest that it was a project from White Sands or an experimental aircraft that had crashed. It was just a field filled with metallic debris… strange debris to be sure but nothing that would lead to the conclusion that it was extraterrestrial.

If Blanchard was aware of the report from Circleville, that might have inspired him to order Haut to issue the press release. Even if he hadn’t seen that story, he had certainly seen many others. Given the time, that is July 1947, few of the explanations suggested interplanetary craft as opposed to interstellar. Scientists, military officers and government officials were offering their take on the sightings but there was certainly nothing that was classified about it. Blanchard’s message center would have been receiving directions and intelligence about a wide variety of subjects on a daily if not hourly basis but I doubt that much space was wasted on flying saucers in those early days.

What this means is that on the morning of July 8, when Blanchard ordered Walter Haut to issue the press release, they weren’t dealing with classified material. They were dealing with some strange debris found by a rancher. They might not have known exactly what it was, but they weren’t thinking in terms of classified material. This explains the press release because it demonstrates that Blanchard was telling the local community they had found elements that might have been part of a flying saucer, whatever that might have meant at that time.

And it explains Marcel taking the material home to show his wife and son. In fact, given the nature of the debris, Marcel might not have felt it necessary to report it to Blanchard until the next morning. He stopped at his house, not necessarily to show them the debris, but because it was on his way to the base, the duty day was over, and there was nothing classified or critical in his possession. He could wait until the morning.

This would, of course, alter the various timelines created about these events, but it doesn’t change anything radically. All it does is provide an answer for why the press release was issued and why Marcel took the material home to show his wife and son. At that point nothing was classified. That would come later, when additional wreckage was found, but at that precise moment, they were dealing with the mundane and not the extraordinary.

Response (of sorts) to Reflections

I rarely respond to reviews of my books because there really is little point to it. I am often astonished on how widely the reviews can vary from someone who loves a book to someone who hates it. In one case a reader (of a different UFO book) was outraged that the book had my name at the top of every other page, complaining that I had such a monestrous ego that I had to see my name on each page... except I had nothing to do with the page layout, the design of the page or what would be at the top of each page. An artist at the publisher had made all those decisions without consulting me.

But with my book, Reflections of a UFO Investigator, there is one point that seems to have appeared frequently and I’m not sure that it is a fair criticism. It has been noted that about a third of the book was devoted to my Roswell investigations, and they did take up a great deal of my time and money, so you would expect a large chunk of the book to deal with that.

That’s not the real problem. It is this idea that I seem to be well grounded in the other aspects of my research. I have offered solutions for many UFO cases, understand that the alleged witnesses sometimes lie for no real reason, that sometimes memory plays tricks on the mind, and that there is no overwhelming evidence for the Roswell case other than limited documentation and a whole bunch of credible eyewitnesses.

These reviewers seem to think that if I applied my methodology to Roswell with the same vigor that I apply it to other cases, why then I would realize that Roswell is explained by Project Mogul...

Makes no difference to these reviewers that Mogul is totally inadequate, that it is based on false assumptions and Air Force maneuvering. Makes no difference that some of it is based on decades old memories or that some of those who claimed it was Mogul had other agendas when they began spouting this solution.

Nope... I’m just too blind to see the forest for all the trees... or maybe too blind to see the balloon debris for all the claims of strangeness attached to it.

But let’s turn this around on them. First, we have Flight #4 which, according to the documentation was cancelled. Charles Moore told me that when that happened, they stripped all the equipment but let the balloons go because they couldn’t put the helium back in the bottles.

So, there was no Flight #4...

Not so, say the proponents, because Dr. Albert Crary’s diary suggested some sort of a launch which was not a real flight, but one to test the equipment since they couldn’t do anything else that day. Some sort of launch with a sonobuoy so they could listen for the radio signals and test the tracking using a B-17.

We know this because Charles Moore said so... even though he is recalling events that took place decades earlier and there seems no reason to remember this particular flight. Nothing extraordinary happened during it, but Moore remembered it anyway.

Then, we have the flight path of the balloons. We don’t know where it went because, well, it wasn’t a real flight and those records were either lost or never made. That doesn’t matter because Charles Moore said that he remembered losing track of the flight near Arabela, which suggested it headed off to the northeast, more or less in the direction of the Brazel (yes, I know the ranch was owned by the Fosters at the time) ranch, where Brazel found it some time later.

Now, this flight was made on June 4 and Brazel supposedly didn’t find it until June 14, or sometime after that, and then didn’t bother to mention it until the July 4 weekend. Never mind that, according to Bill Brazel, the section of the ranch where the debris was found was an important one because it was where the sheep were watered. They checked it out, if not every day, every other day, so the balloon and its debris would have been found much earlier, if that was the source of the debris.

We can discount what Bill said because his memories were decades old and he was confused. Even though he had found some of the debris and his descriptions fit, sort of, that of a balloon remains, though they seemed to be much tougher than anything on a balloon. Yes, he said it was like balsa, meaning light and not very dense, but it was also something that he couldn’t cut with his pocket knife, but hey, those memories are decades old and we can ignore them.

Charles Moore, using winds aloft data that I supplied to him, which, eventually he conveniently forgot (and yes I even have a letter from him asking for additional charts) used that data to postulate the path of his Flight #4, which he said was last seen near the Brazel ranch. Never mind that the winds aloft data was often incomplete and only went to 20,000 feet in 1947 anyway, he was able to tell us what the balloons would do when they reached 80,000 feet.

And guess what, the balloons were heading in the direction of the Brazel ranch. We know this because Moore said so, and he could be believed. His memory was solid and he had the calculations based on incomplete data and his speculations.

So, for those who believe I simply did not review the Roswell data with the same critical eye as I did other investigations, I say, you missed the boat on that one. I say that you have offered no alternative explanation for the debris that was collected under such strict security that some will still not talk about it. I say you should use the same critical eye on the Mogul explanation that you have used on the whole of the Roswell case and ask if you haven’t, just maybe, leaped to the conclusion that you want rather than another that you have constantly ignored.

But here is the difference between the reviewers who make these claims and me. I’m not so locked into one explanation that I won’t look at others. I’m not so locked into the witness stories that I won’t keep attempting to verify what they had said (I think I was one of the first to expose Frank Kaufmann after we had the proof, and to expose Gerald Anderson when we had the proof, and a couple of others who were less than honest... and yes, I know that other researchers called these people liars first but they had no evidence of it. I waited until I knew for certain and yes, I was premature in releasing some of that data).

But say one thing about Charles Moore and the gloves come off. His memories were intact. He had the proof. He was able to identify the Roswell debris when so many others failed...

And I won’t even mention Sheridan Cavitt and his laughable interview with Colonel Richard Weaver.

(Now let’s all start repeating the same things over and over without listening to the other side at all...)