Since
it has been suggested that Ramey had invited reporters from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to his office,
and since some of the quoted material came from a web site that hosted an
interview with J. Bond Johnson, the reporter, I thought I could clarify some of
this by posting the following. This is from my second interview with Johnson,
made about a month after he called me, left his telephone number on my
answering machine asking me to return the call. I note here that Johnson
claimed I had called him cold and he had no opportunity to review his notes or
the
newspaper articles that appeared in 1947… though in the first interview he
actually reads the July 9, 1947 article that he claimed to have written. Or, in
other words, he was not called cold. There are other indications in that
interview that he had already reviewed his “UFO” file, that he had talked to
Betsy Hudon at the University of Texas at Arlington, and he was aware that she
had forwarded a copy of my letter to him which gave him my telephone number. She
wouldn’t tell me who he was but she did say she would forward a letter to him
to facilitate our communication.
 |
| Johnson's picture of General Ramey holding the memo. Photo copyright by the University of Texas at Arlington. |
In
my March 24, 1989 interview, I said, “Could you just sort of tell me what you
did… what transpired when your editor gave you the assignment to go out to the
base.” In response, Johnson said:
My
name is initial J Bond, it’s also James Bond Johnson. I’m the original
[referring obviously to the master spy by the name of Bond, James Bond). I was
a reporter and back up photographer for the Fort
Worth Star-Telegram in July 1947 after having served in the Air Corps as a
pilot-cadet in World War Two.
On
the… Tuesday, July 8, 1947, late in the afternoon, I returned from an
assignment to my office in the city room of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram which was both a morning and afternoon
newspaper. My city editor of the morning paper ran over and said, “Bond, have
you got your camera?” I said, “Yes,” I had it in my car. I had a four by five
Speed Graphic that I had bought recently and I kept it in the car because I was
working nights and police and so forth and had it at the ready. He said, “Go
out to Ramey’s office and, he said, they’ve got something there [and] that to
get a picture. I don’t recall what it he called it. He said they’ve flown
something down… I don’t think he called it something… he gave it a name because
I was kind of prepared for what I was going to see. He said something crashed
out there or whatever and they’re… we
just got an alert on the AP wire [emphasis added to prove a point] … though
it might have been the UPI… that the Air Force or the Air Corps as it was
called then [actually it was the Army Air Forces in July 1947] is flying it
down from Roswell on orders from General Ramey. It would be located in his
office. It was or would be by the time I got out there.
So
I drove directly to Carswell [Fort Worth Army Air Field in July 1947] and my
recollections now are I went in and I opened my carrying case with my Graphic
and I had brought just one holder with me with two pieces of the 4 X 5 film.
Black and white of course. I posed General Ramey with this debris piled in the
middle of his rather large and plush office. It seemed incongruous to have this
smelly garbage piled on the floor… spread out on the floor of this plush, big
office that was probably, oh, 16 by 20 at least.
I
posed General Ramey with this debris. At that time, I was briefed on the idea
that it was not a flying disk as first reported but in fact was a weather
balloon that had crashed. I returned to my office. I was met by a barrage of
people that were unknown to me. These were people who had come over from
Dallas… In those days, any time we had… we normally bussed any prints that we
were sending to the AP, we bussed them to Dallas to be transmitted on the wire
photo machines. We had a receiver but not a sender in Fort Worth in those days.
And no faxes.
After
a discussion of how they transmitted the pictures and we chatted about all the
pictures including the ones of Major Jesse Marcel that Johnson would later claim
he hadn’t taken, he said, “It is entirely possible that I was briefed by the
PIO.”
We
can take this even further. Dennis Balthaser published an interview with
Johnson that can be found here:
During
that interview, Balthaser said, “Finally, another researcher seems to remember
a statement you made that the paper in General Ramey’s hand was a press release
that you handed to General Ramey. Can you verify that as a true statement you
would have made in a previous interview? If yes, please explain.”
Johnson
said, “Yes, that was an early speculation of mine that I might have handed
Ramey the copy of the AP ‘flash’ my editor had given me regarding the Roswell
crash craft being flown to Fort Worth. Obviously I was in error in that
speculation.”
What
all this shows is that the information about the debris going to Fort Worth was
in an AP news alert and had nothing to do with Ramey inviting people out to the
base. We don’t have to speculate about this because we have the information
from the reporter who was involved in it provided before he began think of
himself as “the Roswell photographer.”
We
can corroborate all of this from the news stories that appeared at the time and
the chronology that was published in the Daily
Illini. I also recovered a transmittal letter sent with the photographs
that gave the date as July 8, 1947, the time as 11:59 p.m. and the photographer
as J. Bond Johnson. Later, we can see
that Johnson dramatically altered his story attempting to put himself into the
spotlight. He went so far as to deny that he had written the story that
appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
on July 9, a story that he had told me he had written. He said during my first
interview with him, “Seven nine [July 9] is my story on the front page that was
in earlier … [which, of course, negates the idea that I called him cold and he
hadn’t reviewed his UFO file].”
The
problem for Johnson’s claim that they didn’t know what it was when he was there
is the last paragraph in that article. It said, “After his first look, Ramey
declared all it was was a weather balloon. The weather officer verified his
view.”
For
those who wish to follow this to its end, I did a blog posting on October 9,
2009, about the whole Johnson tale. It can be found here:
This
then should end the idea that Ramey invited anyone out to his office. The story
was on the news wire and the astute editors and reporters would think of
calling Ramey on their own. He received telephone calls from far away and even
did a telephone interview with a reporter on the West Coast. The idea that it
was a weather balloon quickly killed the story and just hours after it broke on
the news wires the interest faded.
But
the point is that Ramey did not call anyone and invite them to his office. The
testimony and the evidence negates that idea. Johnson may have well taken the
teletype alert with him but we don’t know. He might well have taken it into
General Ramey’s office but we don’t know. The evidence for that is
contradictory because Johnson spun many tales about what he did and didn’t do
in General Ramey’s office. However, given what we can prove, it would seem that
we no longer have to speculate about the reason Johnson went out to the base.
