The Decline of Roswell

Back in 1988, when Don Schmitt and I began our investigation into the Roswell case, there were no documents available, other than newspaper articles and a single report from the FBI. The newspaper reports were less than accurate with misspellings of names, and descriptions of the debris. The FBI document, which was based on an interview with Major Kirton (misspelled as Curtan in the FBI report) suggested that the object found was a weather balloon and a radar reflector. It also mentioned that this analysis was not verified by other sources.

It is unclear in the report if the FBI called the 8^th Air Force to find out what was happening or if Kirton had called the FBI to tell them about the recovery. Given the timing of the telex and breaking news, it is more likely that Kirton had called the FBI. That actually isn’t overly important here. I just thought I would mention it as an interesting observation.

Neither the newspaper articles nor the FBI telex do anything to help us understand the Roswell case. There is too little information in them for any conclusive analysis. We are left with questions about the identity of the object found and both the telex and the newspapers can be used to support almost any explanation for Roswell.

But that isn’t the whole story and here I will probably annoy my pals who accept Roswell as an alien spacecraft crash, and may even offend those who believe the answer can be found somewhere on Earth. Since Don and I began our work, other documents have surfaced and been brought into the discussion.

One the first, which was published in its entirety in The MUFON UFO Journal for July 1985, is a top-secret report entitled Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79 and dated December 10, 1948. There is another version of it, or rather the same report, but it is dated April 28, 1949. Neither version of this report makes mention of crash recovered debris, and in fact, says that the origin of the objects cannot be determined. The thinking is that the men responsible for the report, who had top security clearances, would have been able to learn about the Roswell crash had it happened. Since they make no reference to it, this is circumstantial evidence that there wasn’t a crash.

There was a caveat in that report. The officers involved suggested that there needed to be better communication among the military branches to ensure a free flow of information. There could have been some project or information that would have explained everything about the flying saucers if such a free flow existed. In other words, this doesn’t exclude Roswell.

Col. Howard McCoy

Karl Pflock, among others, found another document that reported on the Scientific Advisory Board Conference held on March 17 – 18, 1948, in the Pentagon. Colonel Howard McCoy was discussing Project Sign, the number of reports they had received, suggesting that there was something important going on. He said, “I can’t tell you how much we would give to have one of those crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are.”

McCoy was the intelligence officer at Wright Field and the Air Materiel Command. He was Nathan Twining’s intelligence officer. If there had been a crash near Roswell, McCoy would have been involved in the study or reverse engineering of anything recovered. In fact, McCoy had been involved in the first of the investigations of unidentified aerial phenomena starting with the Foo Fighters in WW II. He was the guy who knew everything about them and was, you might say, Twining’s “go to guy.” If there had been a crash he would have known about it.

General Nathan F. Twining

There are those who say, me among them, that had Roswell involved the crash of an alien spacecraft, it would have been classified top secret. Given that, McCoy was restricted from mentioning this in a briefing that was only classified as secret and some of the participants in it might not have held the proper security clearances to hear top secrets.

But I have always worried about that analysis. While he might not be able to discuss a crash in a conference that was only secret, I wondered why bring it up at all. If none of the participants was thinking in terms of a crash, he had just planted the idea in their minds. True, he had told them that nothing had been recovered and if you know something doesn’t exist, you are not inclined to look for it. Still this was not a good idea. He planted the seed.

This wasn’t the only time that McCoy had brought up the possibility of crash debris. In a letter sent up the chain of command, to those who would have held the proper security clearances and who would have had the need to know. He expressed the same thought. Crash recovered debris would go a long way to answering questions about the identity of the flying saucers.

McCoy sent that letter to the Chief of Staff on November 3, 1948, discussing flying saucers. This was a recap of what they knew, or thought they knew about the “Flying Objects.” In paragraph 8, McCoy wrote:

The possibility that the reported objects are vehicles from another planet has not been ignored. However, tangible evidence to support conclusions about such a possibility are completely lacking.

This becomes more worrisome. McCoy would have no expectation that this letter would be seen by anyone other than those to which it was addressed and it was going to the top guy in the Air Force. He wouldn’t be telling stories out of school and he wouldn’t dare lie. If there had been a crash, he was writing to those who would know about it; more importantly these were the people who had to know about it. They might not have all the specifics, but they would know that there had been a crash of something that was highly unusual. They would know that the craft had been built somewhere else, meaning not on Earth. McCoy would have no reason to lie to them about a crash because of who he was addressing in the letter.

Here's where we stand on this. The documentation that does exist, that came from identified government sources, signed by the men involved who we are able to vet, suggest that they know nothing of crash recovered debris. Being who they were and what their jobs were, they would have known and the discussion would take a different track.

For those believing Roswell involved the crash of an alien spacecraft, this has to be worrisome. It is arrayed against testimony that suggests otherwise. The problem is that it is just testimony and over the years much of that testimony has been found to be inaccurate. The longer we investigate the more of these testimonies have fallen by the wayside.

There is some compelling testimonial evidence of a crash but there is this documentation that suggests otherwise. While that documentation might not completely close the door, it is certainly narrowing the possibility. As I say, for those of us who do attempt to look at all the evidence, this is quite worrisome.

Roswell, the GAO and Hiding Documents

Back in the mid-1990s, New Mexico Representation Steven Schiff asked the Air Force, and by extension other government agencies, what they knew about the UFO crash outside of Roswell. The Government Accounting Office, as it was then known, approached many of those agencies, asking for a search of their files for any documents relating to the event. Predictably, no one found anything that wasn’t already known. The FBI, for example, provided a redacted copy of a message from their Dallas office about information derived from their telephonic investigation of the incident, citing Major Curtan (actually Kirton). I’ve had a complete copy of the document for years which is why I know they misspelled Kirton’s name.

So what? You might be asking yourself.

I read now, of secret documents that come from the raid that killed bin Laden and that had been the subject of FOIA requests by various news agencies including the Associated Press. On May 2, 2011 (or the day after the announcement of the raid by the president), the AP requested “all videos and photographs taken during the raid…”

In March, 2012, according to the DoD response, they could find none of the files… where have we heard that before?

What has been learned, thanks in part to the document dump by Edward Snowden, is that the special operations commander, Admiral William McRaven, ordered the military files purged from the DoD computers and sent on to the CIA. This way they could more easily be kept from the public.

This was done in a blatant attempt (yes, those are my words) to evade the rules of FOIA and the appropriate federal regulations governing the release of this sort of information. The CIA can prevent the release of operational files and this can’t be challenged in court… well, I suppose it can be challenged, but the law would prevent the release.

So now we fall back to the middle of the 1990s, when agencies were searching high and low for any documents that related to Roswell and all said they had nothing that was responsive to that claim. Could it be that those files were moved to other locations to avoid release to the public?

No, I seriously doubt that it was done in response to Schiff’s request, but was

Patrick Saunders

actually done long ago to hide the paper trail for which we have searched for so long. Remember, Patrick Saunders told family members, specifically, daughter Susan, “how well he had covered the ‘paper’ trail’ associated with the clean up!” (She wrote to me on February 20, 1997).

In other words the government was not completely candid in what they had said about the records… or rather, I suppose you could say they were candid; they just looked in all the wrong places.

All this really does, I guess, is show us that the GAO investigation wasn’t the end all because we now know that they, meaning the government agencies and not necessarily the GAO, do hide information. This doesn’t prove that something about Roswell is hidden. It merely opens that door, just a crack.

And I suppose we just add this to all the other information that demonstrates that the government doesn’t release everything it has as we have seen time and again, whether it is the Air Force telling Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico that there never was a Project Moon Dust, to the Condon Committee telling us that UFOs have no effect on National Security. It means, unfortunately, much of what they say is not based in any known reality.

Roswell Dream Team - A Brief Update

By examining a little of the material about the Roswell case, and here I mean a combination of documentation and testimony, we can draw a couple of conclusions in a limited way. I will note that I hold all the documentation for this, meaning I have copies of the relevant material, and I conducted the interviews with the witnesses, which include recordings of the conversations.

Here’s what we know and what we can prove.

According to the mythology of Roswell, the officers at Roswell were so confused by the Mogul arrays, they didn’t know that what they had were mere weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors. They flew the material to Fort Worth, their higher headquarters, where a low-ranking weather officer identified it all as nothing more than a balloon and foil-like rawin.

The problem here is that the timing doesn’t really work out if we believe that the men at Roswell didn’t know what they had until they got to Fort Worth. That would mean that the men in Fort Worth would be unable to identify it until the stuff arrived.

According to the time lines it was at 5:30 p.m. local time that the Dallas Morning News interviewed Major E. M. Kirton. According to the newspaper, the material found in Roswell was nothing more than a weather balloon.

But it was 6:00 p. m. local time that Warrant Officer Irving Newton (seen here with the rawin radar reflector) reported for duty, according to what he told me. The telephone in the office rang and he was ordered to report to Brigadier General Ramey’s office. He said that he was alone in the office and that he couldn’t leave. Ramey himself then called and told Newton, “to get your ass over here now. Use a car and if you don’t have one, take the first one with the keys in it,” according to what Newton said.

When he arrived, a colonel briefed him in the hallway (and if I was going to speculate here, I’d say that would be Colonel Thomas DuBose (later brigadier general), the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force). Newton said that he didn’t remember who it was but that the message had been clear. “These officers from Roswell think they have found a flying saucer, but the general thinks it’s a weather balloon. He wants you to take a look.”

At that point, you might say, the air went out of the Roswell saucer. Nothing more than a weather balloon and a rawin radar target. Newton identified it as ordered and there is no question that the material, spread out on the floor, is the remains of a weather balloon and a radar target. From the photographs available, that is quite clear.

Okay, you say. So what?

How is it that Major Kirton could identify the material as a balloon before Newton arrived on duty, was called to Ramey’s office, and then identified it as a balloon? How did Kirton know this, at least, thirty minutes before anyone else supposedly knew?

Or is it that the cover story had already been decided upon and the actors in that little play were given their scripts. Kirton read from his, but he was more than thirty minutes too early. He should have said that the material was in Ramey’s office and it would be looked at by various experts...

In fact, why is it that only Newton was called forward to identify the material? Doesn’t this suggest that the fix was in?

And on a related point, while rereading the newspaper (specifically The Boston Herald of July 9, 1947) articles, I came across a statement by Brigader General Donald N. Yates, who in 1947 was the chief of the Army Air Forces weather service. He said, about the weather balloon and rawin radar targets, that only a very few of them are used daily, at some points where some specific project requires highly accurate wind information from extreme altitudes.

I mention this for two reasons. One is that in a letter to me, Newton used similar wording. He wrote, in 1995 I might add, that “The rawin target and balloon in question, was only used at limited locations...”

The suggestion here was that they were unusual and it wouldn’t be difficult for the men at Roswell to confuse this debris for something more exotic... except, the rawins and balloons were used at Operation Crosswords. These were the atomic tests in the Pacific in 1946, carried out with crews from the 509th, so the men at Roswell might well have been familiar with the look of the rawins.

And, second, there is the find from Circleville Ohio, as reported around the country in the days prior to the announcement from Roswell. Here a farmer found a weather balloon and rawin target in his field, but knew what it was. He took it to the sheriff, who knew what it was, and it was displayed in the window of the local newspaper, where, apparently everyone else knew what it was. Oh, they couldn’t have told you it was a rawin, but they would have told you that the object was a weather balloon and something attached to it.

Yet the guys in Roswell couldn’t identify it, even though they had the balloon envelop and the torn up target on display in Ramey’s office... and no one explained why the rawin was so torn up.

The real point here is that the timing was off, based on the documentation and testimony available. The timing of the announcements make it sound as if the answer was prepared before Newton arrived to give it. He was the window dressing. The expert who had worked with the rawins and the balloons and would know what it was. And the press, who ever they were (Newton mentioned several reporters) took that answer, as did Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, J. Bond Johnson, and returned to their city rooms. In a couple of hours, it was reported that the Roswell debris was a “weather forecasting device.”

And that was the end of it... for more than thirty years.