TheSneezingMonkey Fails in Debunking Roswell

I am growing very tired of the Internet and the number of people who use it to expose their ignorance. Please note the term ignorance. I am granting them the intelligence to realize their mistakes when speaking about UFOs. When they claim a deep dive, it seems to be into the shallow end of the pool, and I realize my task is greater than I thought.

Let’s talk about TheSneezingMonkey and his latest rant about some things Ufological. It is clear to me, that he just doesn’t bother with the deep dive research he claimed which, in the world today and the Internet, is much simpler than it was even a decade ago. The answers are out there, if you’re smart enough to find them.

Take the analysis by TheSneezingMonkey when he is talking about the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. He grabbed several explanations but he talked about the Flying Wing, suggesting that it might be what Arnold had seen. He did question if there would have been several of them flying in formation.  

He was talking about the YB-35 Flying Wing which did exist at the time. Several of them were being tested at Muroc Army Air Field (later Edwards Air Force Base). What he didn’t find, and what I published more than two decades ago, is that in June 1947, all of them were grounded.

Here’s what I know about that. The YB-35, a full-scale Flying Wing, first flew on June 25, 1946 from Muroc AAF. On September 11, 1946, the YB-35, suffering from gear box and propeller problems was grounded. A full-scale flying program would not resume until February 1948. There were test flights made on June 26, 1947 (two days after the Arnold sighting) but the single aircraft did not leave Southern California. The Flying Wing simply was not available in the numbers or location to be seen by Arnold. It really has no place in this discussion in the world today.

Arnold's original drawing to the Army. It looks nothing like the Flying Wing,
which is probably a better way to eliminated that aircraft as the source

But what really set the tone here was a comment made to the YouTube channel by someone calling himself or herself @RUTHAN667. That comment said, “Rosswell is mostly based on Marcell story and he is proven liar, got his moment of fame, lied to be pilot, lied about that he shoot down 5 planes.. Whole family, started finding diaries and milked story dry.. Later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies.. Brasel imprisonning. Corso cashed on it too.”

Well, it’s not Rosswell but Roswell and it’s not Marcell but Marcel. From there we move into territory that isn’t as black and white as it seems. While I wouldn’t call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar, the problem is that he made some claims that were less than truthful. He didn’t say he was a pilot, but had flown as a pilot while serving in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces during World War II.

True, I’m splitting a fine hair here, and it seems unlikely that an officer who is not rated would accumulate that much flight time. I can envision him getting some stick time but not 3000 hours. I can say that I flew as a door gunner in Vietnam but I was not rated in that position. I was a helicopter pilot and later an aircraft commander and accumulated just under 2000 hours during that portion of my career. I’m willing to give him a pass on that particular claim because of the way things worked in aviation units. Clearly, Marcel did participate in combat missions during his tour in the Pacific and was awarded two air medals for that.

Kevin Randle in Vietnam in 1969

However, as we break this down, Marcel apparently told Bob Pratt that he, Marcel, had five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft. I got Marcel’s records and the Unit Histories from the units in which he served. There is no indication that he shot down any enemy aircraft. The Army Air Forces kept records of the majority of those who downed enemy aircraft and Marcel’s name does not appear on the list. And yes, that list includes the names of the men who shot down enemy aircraft in all theaters of the war, and those flying as gunners but not pilots. The enlisted man with the most recorded kills shot down 19 enemy planes, but he was not a pilot. I believe it was Richard Bong who holds the American record with 40. Pappy Boyington, I believe shot down 28 (though I think he was only credited with 26).

At any rate, Marcel doesn’t get a pass on this. There is simply no evidence to support his claim of five air medals (though I have the citations for the two he did receive).

There are other things that he said that we can’t verify. His testimony is problematic. I will note, however, where we have additional witnesses and documentation, then what he said was probably accurate. He did travel to the Brazel (Foster) ranch and he did gather up metallic debris. He did escort that material to Fort Worth.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the Debris Field, 1989.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The whole Marcel family did not begin to find diaries. In going through the papers and files handed down from Jesse Marcel, Sr. to his son and then to the grandchildren in 2013, they did find a “Memorandum Book,” which the Army passed out by the thousands. I have two of them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Marcel was the author of the notations and even if he was, there is nothing in that diary to confirm the events of July 1947. The criticism about finding diaries is inaccurate.

The idea that “later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies…” is not an accurate picture either. The trouble was that we had Bill Brazil, the son of the man who found the debris field, showing us where he had picked up some of the strange debris. It is located southeast of Corona, New Mexico. We, that is Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I were able to find witnesses to that field other than just Marcel (and these include Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer who accompanied Marcel out to the field). Bill Brazel took Don and me to the debris field. He parked his truck and said that this was where he had found some of that debris. Others, such as Loretta Proctor and Bud Payne pointed to the same location.

However, during our investigation, we interviewed several officers and senior NCOs who talked about a much shorter trip to the crash site. While it took three hours or more to arrive at the debris field, they talked about a short trip of under an hour. These included Bill Rickett and Chester Barton. Brigadier General Arthur Exon told us about two sites, oriented northwest to southeast that he had flown over in the weeks that followed. Eventually, witnesses to that second site, where bodies were located, were found.

Don Schmitt and me on the Impact Site, 2023. Site was identified by
several eyewitnesses.

The stories were not invented but recovered through careful investigation and corroboration. It is established that there were two sites and we, Don, Tom and I invented nothing. We just went where the testimonies took us and reported accurately what others said. In many cases, it took long contact with the witnesses for them to trust us with the tale, and then, often, only if we didn’t reveal who they were.

Mack Brazel, the man who started this by taking samples of the metallic debris to  Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox, was held at the Roswell Army Air Field. The base Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, told me Brazel had been held in the guest house, which not the same as being in the stockade, but then, if you’re not allowed to leave, what really, is the difference?

We, Don, Tom and I talked to neighbors of Mack, such as Marian Strickland, who told us he complained about being held on the base. Neighbor Floyd Proctor told researchers that he’d seen Mack in Roswell in the company of several Army officers. That suggests that the story about his being held at the base is true even if the cell didn’t have bars... just guards watching.

So, we see that @RUTHAN667’s rant contains a single fact about Marcel embellishing his resume, which really is lying no matter how I attempt to sugarcoat it. And there are other things that Marcel said that weren’t true. If Marcel was the single witness to this, we could certainly dismiss it as a tale invented by him. But, every member of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff that we interviewed, with a single exception, verified parts of the story. When we expanded the search to other members of the 509^th Bomb Group, we found many officers and enlisted men who were involved in bits and pieces of the story. They might have seen only some of the metal recovered, or were involved in security at various sites, and even a few who did mention the bodies, the story is not stand alone. Many of them did not approach us. We found them and asked questions about those events.

I’ll note here that Major Easley, told me that the craft was extraterrestrial. Well, it was a little different than that. I asked him if we were following the right path. He asked what I meant by that and I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley in 1947. Photo courtesy
of the Roswell Army Air Field Yearbook.

There is so much more that could be said here. You want to talk about mistakes we made. Sure. We believed that Frank Kaufmann was telling the truth until we found evidence that he wasn’t. We, again Don, Mark Rodeghier, Mark Chesney and I exposed those lies in an issue of International UFO Reporter.

But the only fact that @RUTHAN667 got right was that Marcel claimed five aerial victories and had none. Everything else is misinterpretation of the facts or ignoring body of evidence that has been accumulated, vetted, repaired and reported by us. I would suggest reading Roswell in the 21^st Century and Understanding Roswell that I wrote and Tom Carey and Don Schmitt’s Witness to Roswell to get a better interpretation of the situation. And if you want the other side, I’d recommend Karl Pflock’s Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. I’d especially recommend you read the affidavit section of his book. These affidavits were gathered by several of us over many weeks.

I suggest that you, @RUTHAN667, do a little more research before you shoot your mouth off (and learn to spell) and TheSneezingMonkey, if you’re going to be skeptical and claim a deep dive, do a great deal more research.

If the mood moves me, I think next time I’ll attack the Washington National sightings. I interviewed two of the officers who were in the radar room during some of those sightings, and have transcripts of interviews with one of the fighter pilots who talked about the lights surrounding him during an attempted intercept.

And don’t even get me started on the Pascagoula abduction. Yes, I talked to both Hickson and Parker and TheSneezingMonkey wasn’t even close on his ridiculous analysis. 

The Observer Anti-Roswell Article: A Brief Response

 The Observer published an article by Bernie O’Connor suggesting that the story of an alien event in Roswell is a hoax based on the recovery of a Project Mogul balloon. I don’t know why it is so difficult for those on the skeptical side of the fence to realize that the Mogul explanation doesn’t work. Simply put, Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, was cancelled. That is based on the documentation available.

For those interested in the original article, I believe the current issue of The Observer can be seen here:

https://theobservermagazine.substack.com/about?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In the following rebuttal to this claim, and the interview that O’Connor conducted with Colonel Walter Klinikowski which is the source for his report, I provide some additional commentary. As most of you know, I have worked on the Roswell UFO crash story for about thirty years, I thought some of my insights might be helpful in understanding this latest piece. To show that I have been around for a long time, I’ll tell you the Delta pilot reference is Kent Jeffrey, who wrote the Roswell Initiative and later repudiated it. I covered this in an entry in The Roswell Encyclopedia that was published in 2000. Kent’s MUFON article, abbreviated and published with his permission is included in that book.

Kent Jeffrey, Tom Carey and Kent's father in New Mexico. 
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The reason that I, and others did not bother with Colonel Klinikowski, is his statement that he wasn’t in Roswell at the time of the event, though he was assigned to the base at time. According to the base telephone directory, he was assigned to Operations. In July 1947, the Operations Officer was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Briley, who made comments that contradict Klinikowski. But, like Klinikowski, he didn’t see anything himself, but in talking with others concluded that something important had happened. Briley told me that the story of Blanchard’s leave was a cover story so he could go to the crash site without reporters wondering where he had gone. Blanchard would not have gone to the site for what amounted to a weather balloon and common radar reflector.

Klinikowski clearly supported the Project Mogul theory, telling us that the project was highly classified, but the truth is, the ultimate purpose was classified, but the experiments in Alamogordo were not. Pictures of one of the arrays appeared in the Alamogordo News on July 10, 1947. Charles Moore, who worked on the New York University balloon project there told me that he had purchased the step ladder that appears in one of the pictures, linking it to what he insisted on calling the New York University balloon project rather than Project Mogul.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data. Photo by
Kevin Randle.

The ladder to which Moore referred. Picture from the
Alamogordo News, July 10, 1947.

Here’s one of those facts that gets overlooked. Dr. Albert Crary, who was the leader of the balloon project, used the name Mogul at least three times in his unclassified journal and diary notes, proving that they knew about Mogul. Again, the ultimate purpose was not known, but the name, Mogul, was. I’ll note that in the book, Roswell in the 21^st Century, there is a long appendix that covers the whole Mogul tale.

Thanks to Colonel Richard Weaver, who ran the Air Force investigation about Roswell in the 1990s, we have copies of the data collected by Crary’s experiments in New Mexico. The problem here is that Mogul balloon flight in question, No. 4 was not flown. According to the documentation, it was to be launched on June 4, 1947, but was cancelled because of clouds. Charles Moore told me that the next flight, No. 5, was configured exactly like No. 4, and Flight No.5 had no radar targets, an important point. Moore would later claim that they received data from Flight No. 4, but there is nothing recorded for it. They did release a cluster of balloons later in the day, on June 4, that was not a Mogul flight and never strayed from the range.

In his article, Bernie O’Connor wrote: “I [meaning Klinikowski] wasn't even in Roswell when it happened and when I got back to town there was some mention of it. The debris landed on my cousin by marriage's ranch and his name is Dewey Stoke and he never saw this stuff because it was picked up by the Air Force people from the base of Roswell and they took the stuff and shipped it off to Wright Patterson Air Force Base which was the home of what was then called the Air Technical Intelligence Center.”

But here’s part of the problem. The debris landed on a ranch owned by the Fosters and Mack Brazel recovered some of it. He took it to the Chaves County Sheriff (Roswell) and George Wilcox called out to the air base. Jesse Marcel, Sr., responded and did not recognize it as balloon debris though he was familiar with weather balloons and radar targets. Some of that early debris was sent on to Fort Worth Army Air Field where Colonel (later brigadier general) Thomas DuBose had it sent on to Washington, D.C. Dewey Stoke never saw the stuff, so I must ask, “What is his purpose in this tale?”

Bud Payne, who was a New Mexico judge, told Don Schmitt and me, where he had seen the field of metallic debris. It was on the ranch managed by Mack Brazel, and he put us on the same bit of ground where Bill Brazel found some of the metallic debris days and weeks later.

We do have testimony from Bill Brazel who handled debris, and his description of a gouge in the terrain. He provided descriptions that vaguely match some modern material such as fiber optics. Jesse Marcel, Sr. and Jesse Marcel, Jr., provided descriptions that eliminate Earth-based technology.

Bill Brazel in 1989. Photo by Kevin Randle

There are eye witnesses to both the debris field and impact site. General Arthur Exon told me and Don Schmitt that he had flown over the two sites, which would tend to rule out a Mogul flight since it would not have gouged the terrain or been scattered over two separate sites that were miles apart. All of it would have stayed clumped together.

Finally, Bernie O’Connor wrote, “The problem with Roswell, as well as with any other classic UFO cases, is the fact that one small bit of new evidence presented—the offhand comment by an authority figure, or the rediscovered testimony or official document—can upend the whole belief scenario. Humpty-Dumpty could have a great fall.”

If anyone wishes for a little bit of documentation. Major Patrick Saunders was the base adjutant in 1947. On the fly leaf of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Saunders wrote, “This is the truth and I still haven’t told anybody anything!” He signed it, “Pat.” Any yes, I verified the signature with Saunder’s son, using the flight records of the senior Saunders.

The Saunder's statement in The Truth
About the UFO Crash at Roswell.

The authority figure is Colonel Klinikowski. However, Colonel DuBose, who was responsible for sending some debris to Washington, D.C., said that the balloon material was substituted for the debris taken to Fort Worth by Marcel. Marcel said that the material in the photographs taken in General Ramey’s office was not what he had taken to Fort Worth. Brigadier General Arthur Exon provided testimony about the material arriving at Wright-Patterson in 1947, including comments about those who examined it saying they could not identify it. Do my authority figures, who were there and handled the debris trump those cited by O’Connor? Does it suggest that there is more to this story than meets the eye?

And I haven’t even mentioned Major (later Colonel) Edwin Easley, the provost marshal on the base who told me that the extraterrestrial path was the correct one to follow. I had asked him if we were on the right path. He asked, “What do you mean?” I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “Let me put it this way. It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley

Please notice here that I have quoted from members of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff who were there and made their own observations of the debris and who were on the sites of the wreck. These are statements they made to me, or to Don, or Tom Carey or that were wrote down.

Butch Blanchard told Chester Lytle that four bodies had been recovered. Given the nature of their friendship and the high-level trust by Blanchard in Lytle, this is a somewhat telling statement. It is difficult to believe that Blanchard would say that to anyone if it was not true. Art McQuiddy, who was the editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch told me that they put wreckage on an aircraft and flew it on to Fort Worth. Not exactly proof positive, but a suggestion that what was found was something more than an off-the-shelf-weather balloon and a somewhat degraded rawin radar reflector.

As can be seen, I was aware of Klinikowski through his conversations with Kent Jeffrey. He had nothing to contribute to the investigation beyond the balloon theory, one that Don Schmitt and I explored early in our investigation and rejected for lack of proof, meaning eyewitness testimony and the documentation of balloon flights that removed Mogul from the equation.

For those interested and who have read The Observer article, there is another problem. Bernie O’Connor reported that Klinikowski said, “Well with two other full colonels and a fellow named Weinbrenner (Col. George R. Weinbrenner) who was the Commander of the Foreign Technology Division and Walter Vitunac (Col. Walter Charles Vitunac) who was the former Director of Collection and then me, who was the Director of Collection.”

The suggestion that Weinbrenner was one of the top officers who did not believe in the alien explanation is repudiated here. Tony Bragalia provided additional commentary at his website. You can read it here:

https://substack.com/redirect/297ee407-8ebb-4cb0-a64b-5446b232dd65?j=eyJ1IjoiZ2ZicmIifQ.fyOy7XcsRMdZdNETog-CMWQrAzIY0u-O58q7WQBlqUU

What all this suggests is that there are far more witnesses, both first and second hand who have come down on the side of an alien event. Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I have talked with dozens of them. To me, the weight of the evidence leans toward the extraterrestrial. All known terrestrial explanations have been eliminated.

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.)

New Documentation for Roswell: The Easley Letter

 

As anyone who has been following the Roswell case knows, we, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and I, have been searching for documentation for, literally, decades. We have, of course, all the newspaper articles, the FBI Telex, and one or two hints of something strange falling outside Roswell. We have no diaries, letters, journals or other written statements from the time of the crash that mention the crash. One of the possible exceptions is a magazine article written by Inez Wilcox, wife of the sheriff, that mentions the little men. The problem is that there is no date on it, and the article might have been written after the Roswell crash became prominent in 1978. We need something from 1947.

Don and me on the Impact Site.

We did find a diary that had been kept by Ruth Barnett. Her niece, Alice Knight told me that she had found the diary in a box of material she had received after the death of her aunt. The diary, a daily reminder book for the year 1947, was in there and Ruth used it as a diary. She made entries for the entire year of 1947 and there is no mention of any UFO crash on the Plains of San Agustin.

Stan Friedman, when I met him so that we could copy the diary, suggested that Barney Barnett had been warned about keeping quiet, so he wouldn’t have told Ruth about his adventures over on the Plains. However, according to Vern Maltais, a good friend of Barnett, said that he’d learned of the crash when Barney told him about it at Thanksgiving. That suggests that Barnett wasn’t cowed by the orders to remain quiet, and even if he hadn’t mentioned it in July, he was talking about it in November. There is no notation in the diary about this amazing story that Barney had shared with friends and family during that Thanksgiving get together. There is just nothing said about it until Bill Moore interviewed Barnett’s boss after 1978.

The other document, to surface recently was the alleged diary of Jesse Marcel. This was a standard Army “Memorandum” book that the Army handed out by the hundreds of thousands over the years. I’d had several of them during my military career. Since that book was found in Jesse Marcel’s the possessions, it might have provided a clue about the crash. Unfortunately, once again, there was nothing in it to suggest a crash. To make it worse, handwriting analysis suggested that Marcel had not made the notations in the book.

I have learned in the last several months there was another officer in the office with Marcel. Major Dalton Smith was assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in 1947, and his office number matches that of Marcel. I know nothing much about Smith, other than he was there in 1947 and had the same number. It suggests to me that Smith might be the author of the notations in the Memorandum book. And since the notations aren’t all that personal, when Smith left the 509^th, he left that book behind… Or, when Marcel left, he threw it in box with other items. At any rate, there is nothing of consequence in the book.

The notable one exception to all this was a two-paragraph mention in a Saga magazine article published in the Winter 1974 issue. B. Ann Slate and Stan Friedman, in the article “UFO Battles the Air Force Couldn’t Coverup,” report that Lydia Sleppy had said that her attempt to put the story of the crash over the news wire had been interrupted.  You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/05/lydia-sleppy-1973-interview.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/reports-of-roswell-crash-before-jesse.html

So, we now reach the latest bit of corroboration. I believe that I’m the only researcher to have ever interviewed Major Edwin Easley, the base provost marshal in 1947. He would have been responsible for security at the crash site and on the base. In my interviews, he told me, several times that he couldn’t talk about it because he had been sworn to secrecy. He said that he had promised the president he wouldn’t talk about it.

Skeptics, of course, criticized the statement, wondering if the president would talk to a lowly major. I was of the opinion Easley certainly could have made the promise to an emissary of the president. Both Don and I had learned of several secret service agents who had been dispatched to Roswell in 1947. 

Major Edwin Easley

In a letter dated December 30, 1947, and addressed to Colonel Blanchard, the Roswell base commander, we do have some corroboration for Easley’s help. While the opening paragraph seems to be seasonal boilerplate, meaning it talks about the season and “Your efforts in our behalf repeatedly served to great advantage.”

The second paragraph is the important one. It says, “In these regards, Major Edwin D. Easley, Provost Marshal and his able staff has been particularly helpful. Their intelligent understanding of investigative problems, their devotion and their untiring diligence, regardless of circumstances, had been directly responsible for the successful conclusion of many difficult undertakings.”

The Easley Letter

While this can be viewed as a generic “atta-boy” letter, it is relevant because of the timeframe, 1947, and that I currently know of no other event in which Easley would have been involved in something with the Secret Service. It does underscore Easley’s involvement and helps establish that Easley might well have promised the president that he wouldn’t talk about it by making that promise to the Secret Service representative rather to the president directly. As I have said, this is the latest document relating to the Roswell crash and one of the few that we have.

Roswell Crash Date and Mogul Problem

 

A few days ago, I was asked about the true date of the Roswell crash. It was pointed out that the dates that had been published in the past were July 2, July 4 and July 8. I had settled on July 4 based on what Frank Kaufmann had said and Kaufmann even produced a document with that date on it. When it turned out that Kaufmann had been making up stuff, I rejected the July 4 date because, well, Kaufmann was making up stuff.

In the world today, I believe that Don Schmitt and Tom Carey have landed on the July 2 date. This was the sighting by Dan Wilmot in Roswell of a craft heading, more or less to the northwest. I’m not sure that it’s related to the crash because the coincidence of being close in time and location to the crash doesn’t necessarily mean that what Wilmot saw was what fell.

So, the answer for the question, from my point of view is that I don’t know the exact date, other than the first week in July. But this set me to thinking about the timing of Mack Brazel’s trip into Roswell and what that tells us about the events of early July.

Let’s take a stroll down the timeline for all this and see what we can deduce.

We know that the Project Mogul flight scheduled for June 4, 1947, was cancelled based on Dr. Albert Crary’s diary. We know that they flew what he described as a cluster of balloons sometime later that day and Charles Moore told me that it was launched after the cancellation of the full array. We don’t need to argue about what that means because it is irrelevant for this discussion.

Moore, in his analysis, written after I had interviewed him, reported that the flight was launched “probably around 0300 MST,” and that the flight lasted a “calculated duration: 466 min,” or seven hours and forty-six minutes. Whether it was launched before dawn or sometime later, on June 4, it would have landed on the Brazel ranch (yes, for the purists, I know it was really the Foster ranch) on June 4 either around noon or in the late afternoon. The exact time is unimportant because whatever the time, it was still on June 4.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data in Socorro. Photo by Kevin Randle.

We know, based on the documentation and the newspaper articles, that Major Jesse Marcel, Sr. arrived in Fort Worth on July 8, 1947, with some of the recovered debris. Some of the documentation suggests he left Roswell as early as ten in the morning, while other information suggests it was later in the day. For our purposes here, that doesn’t matter.

We know, and this is based on my experiences driving from Roswell to the ranch, that it takes about three hours to get there. That was on modern roads and routes, which did not exist in 1947. Marcel, in interviews mentioned that they had traveled overland but I’m not sure that would have cut much off the travel time. This means, of course, that Marcel was on the scene on July 7 and returned to Roswell very late on the seventh.

We know, based on what Marcel said, that he had been eating lunch at the Officers Club when Sheriff George Wilcox called him about the debris that Brazel had brought to town. Given the sequence of events then, we know that Marcel, along with Sheridan Cavitt, couldn’t have left Roswell much before four or five in the afternoon and that puts them at the ranch too late in the evening to do anything about the debris or examine the field in which it fell.

Since Marcel was clearly in Roswell on July 8 and since he left for the Brazel ranch late in the afternoon and remained there overnight, Brazel had to have arrived at the sheriff’s office on July 6. It was too late on the July 7 for them, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt to have driven out to the ranch, examined the debris found by Brazel and returned to Roswell that night. The only scenario that makes sense was that Brazel had driven to Roswell on July 6.

The debris field identified by Bill Brazel for Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt.

Of course, there is the newspaper account that said Brazel had driven into Roswell on July 7 to sell some wool. That simply does not track with the timing of the drive back to the ranch, the examination of the field and the return to Roswell. Marcel and Cavitt would have been required to make their inspection in the dark. And, although Cavitt claimed that they didn’t remain there overnight, Marcel did make such a claim. In my discussions with Cavett, it was clear that he, along with Brazel and possibly Marcel, was there in the daylight.

But the point is irrelevant to the present discussion because, no matter what date Brazel drove to Roswell and what date Marcel and Cavitt followed him back the to ranch, it all happened in early July. The three days, the sixth, seventh or eighth, are the real markers here and, as I say, the exact date doesn’t matter for this discussion.

There is another point to be made here. Overlooking the fact that Brazel brought in samples of the debris, which would have negated the need to drive out to the ranch, if that debris was part of Project Mogul and if part of Mogul, it would have fallen on June 4. In other words, it would have laid out, in that field, for more than a month. We know, based on the testimony of Bill Brazel, and later that of Tommy Tyree, the sometimes ranch hand, that Mack Brazel was in that particular field every other day if not every day. The question becomes, why did it take him a month to call in the military?

Here's the rub. Had the debris been the remains of a Project Mogul balloon array, it wouldn't have taken Brazel long to clean it up. Had it been a Project Mogul balloon array, there would have been a reward card attached which would have directed him to Alamogordo rather than Roswell. Moore talked about these reward cards but said that not all the balloon arrays had them. This, of course, makes little sense. Why wouldn’t all the arrays have had the reward cards?

We were told by neighbors and by Bill Brazel, that Mack wondered who was going to clean up the mess he had found. That suggests something much more robust than the remains of a few weather balloons and some string. There is no evidence that rawin targets were involved. Flight No. 5, the “first successful” flight in New Mexico, had no rawin targets and Moore had suggested to me that the make-up of Flight No.5 was the same as Flight No. 4. Later, he claimed that it was closer to Flight No. 2 which did have rawin targets on it. But it was flown months earlier on the East Coast and the documentation in New Mexico mentions nothing about rawin radar targets until later in July.

We know when Mack Brazel reported the debris to the military based on the timing of the situation. That would have been on July 6, so the crash took place in the days prior to that based on the need to water the livestock.

Given what we know, whatever it was, fell in the days prior to July 6, most probably on July 4 or 5. If we accept the July 7 date for his trip to Roswell, then the craft, whatever it was, fell on July 6. I can’t narrow it down any more than that because we have nothing to tell us the exact date of the crash. However, we know that it wasn’t the Mogul array launched on June 4. Brazel would have found it in the days that followed and would have reported it to those in Roswell in early June. It was too far to make such a trip unless there was a compelling reason to do so. That would have been the amount of debris that suggests that he would not have been able to clean it all up quickly. Instead, he drove into Roswell for the assistance of the military. As I say, he could have picked up the remains of a Mogul balloon array in a matter of minutes and not needed to go to Roswell. In fact, he could have loaded it all into his pickup truck and taken to Roswell to show them. There would then be no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to travel out to that field.

This is just one more reason to reject the Mogul scenario. It doesn’t fit the timing, doesn’t fit with the facts, and fails to explain why Brazel felt the need to go to Roswell. He could have picked up the debris and that would have been the end of it. Instead, he reported the debris to the Army and began a mystery that continues after three-quarters of a century.

Lue Elizondo and Two Crashes on the Same Day

 

While I was reading the material posted to the Anomalist website (www.anomalist.com), I followed a couple of links and came to a story headlined, “’Roswell Was Real, Claimed Apollo 14 Astronaut, Elizondo Suggests 2 UFOs Crashed That Day.” (No, the headline is not suggesting that Elizondo was an astronaut… I think they needed a semi-colon rather than a comma to make it clear.)

That headline intrigued me because of the suggestion that two UFOs had crashed on the same day. This was the theory spun by Stan Friedman in an attempt to validate the Plains of San Agustin crash site identified by Barney Barnett. Friedman’s theory was that the UFOs had collided with one falling to the Brazel (Foster) ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and the other coming down farther to the west, on the Plains.

I do not believe there was a crash on the Plains in July 1947, and the reason that theory was ever considered was that the original information, provided by Jesse Marcel, Sr., had no mention of alien bodies. Barney Barnett, however, who lived in Socorro, New Mexico, did tell of something falling on the Plains and that he had seen the bodies of an alien flight crew. Ruth Barnett kept a diary for all of 1947, and there is no mention of anything like that in her written record. I have explored this in the past, at length, and you can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/07/finding-ruth-barnett-diary.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-plains-of-san-agustin-crash.html

The point is, given the information I have uncovered and the investigation that I conducted, there was no evidence substantiate the dual crash aspect of the Roswell case. In one of the more notorious tales told, Gerald Anderson, said that he was on the Plains that day and saw the crashed craft and the alien creatures. Friedman continued to support Anderson long after it was clear that Anderson lied about his involvement. You can read more about that here, but you need to scroll down to find the relevant information about Anderson:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/08/stan-friedman-vs-philip-klass-whats.html

Don Schmitt at the Anderson crash site with the Plains behind him. In the far distance is
the location of the bat cave where scientists were working beginning on July 1. They would have 
seen the crash had there been one, but none of them did.

To me, if Elizondo was, in fact, saying that two UFOs crashed that day, it suggested he was not on the inside because two UFOs had not crashed that day. The Barnett tale had been single witness with no corroboration, and in fact, scientists who were in the area at the time and who had a perfect view of the entire Plains, did not corroborate the story. Given all that, it seemed that Elizondo might not have been the insider that he claimed.

However…

And you knew there would be a “however”…

I wanted to know exactly what he had said, and I wanted to know where he had said it. According to the story in the Roswell Daily Record, Elizondo said, “Before I was part of AATIP, I had no idea about Roswell, other than that there was sort of some alleged crash at some point and some farmer found debris – but during my time with AATIP, there was some very interesting anecdotal information that suggests there wasn’t just one crash, there may have been two crashes, and that somehow it may have been related to some sort of testing that was being done at the time at White Sands, and that the material was recovered.”

He didn’t add much in that article about what he knew, only that these were things that he had heard from those who had been around since the days of Project Blue Book. This is exactly the same sort of thing that Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and I have heard for many years from people who were actually in Roswell at the time or who were in the Army Air Forces when the object crashed. Brigadier General Arthur

Arthur Exon

Exon, for example, provided us with these same stories about what he had heard when he was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1947. Exon even talked about the recovery of alien creatures and what happened to the bodies once they had been moved out of Roswell.

My original purpose here was to suggest that if Elizondo was talking about two crashes on the same day, that would tend to undercut his importance to the UFO investigation given that there was only the single event. But the newspaper story doesn’t say anything about two crashes on the same day, only that there were two crashes. And, he says that these were anecdotal tales he had been told, not that he had seen documents or classified studies which changes the importance of what he said. Only that he had heard these things from others who he suggested would have known the truth.

This turned out not to be much of a chase for accurate information. I guess you could say that it was a “nothing burger.” I was intrigued by the headline that was inaccurate and reading the whole story gave the correct information. It does, however, show that Roswell is still alive in the UFO world.

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.

The End of Project Mogul

 

In Understanding Roswell, I looked again, at the Air Force’s ultimate answer for the UFO crash, which had written off as a balloon array from the “highly classified” Project Mogul. The Air Force, in their investigation, had eliminated all possible terrestrial answers, as civilian UFO researchers had done in the years before the Air Force entered the arena. We knew, based on our research, that there had been no aircraft accidents, civilian, military or experimental. There were no stray rockets or missiles from the White Sands Proving Ground and nothing associated with the 509^th Bomb Group that would account for the debris. There was no sort of nuclear accident that would have accounted for the high level of security testified to by the witnesses, both military and civilian. Had there been some sort of highly classified project in play, that would have explained the security, but since all that happened seventy-five years ago, there would be no legitimate reason for the secret to be kept in today’s environment.

This means that all of us, military, civilian, interested and uninterested, reached the same basic conclusion about what had fallen near tiny Corona, New Mexico, in July 1947. We all agreed that something had fallen. It was the identify of object that had left the debris scattered over about three quarters of a mile of pasture land in the high desert that was the question.

The lone exception to this was the classified balloon project code named “Mogul.” According to the Air Force investigation, this program, designed to place a constant level balloon in the upper atmosphere allowing American scientists and intelligence officers to listen for atomic detonations in the Soviet Union, left the debris. This was the reason for the high-level of security because no one in Washington, D.C., or the Pentagon for that matter, wanted the Soviets to know that we were listening for their atomic bomb testing.

While this would explain the classification of the ultimate purpose, that did not cover the experiments in Alamogordo, New Mexico, that began in June, 1947. The activities there, known to those who participated in them as the New York University balloon project, were not classified, and, in fact, information about those activities was printed in newspapers around the United States on July 10, 1947. This negates the claim of high security in New Mexico and the reason for the secrecy there.

Phyllis McGuire

There are other aspects to this. According to the testimony of Phyllis McGuire, the teenaged daughter of Chaves County, New Mexico, Sheriff George Wilcox, when rancher Mack Brazel appeared in the Roswell office, she was there. The Wilcox family lived above the sheriff’s office. She reported that Brazel told the sheriff about the strange metal debris that he had found in one of the fields on the ranch he managed. More importantly, she mentioned that Brazel had brought samples of the debris with him.

While there are those who would suggest that the teenaged daughter revealing this decades later might not be the most reliable of sources, there is corroboration for this. General Thomas DuBose, the Chief of Staff for the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth in 1947, interview by Don Schmitt and others, said that strange metallic debris discovered by Brazel, was sent by special flight to Fort Worth.

According to DuBose, the debris was taken to Fort Worth “two or three days earlier,” meaning, of course two or three days prior to the July 8 announcement that a “flying saucer” had been captured. It was DuBose who had alerted those in Washington that something had been found and it was DuBose who received orders from Major General Clements McMullen to bring a sample of that debris to Washington, sometime on Sunday, July 6.

BG Thomas Dubose

In a recorded interview, DuBose said, “He [McMullen] called me and said that I was, there was some talk of some elements that had been found on the ground outside Roswell, New Mexico. That the debris or elements were to be placed in a suitable container, and Blanchard was to see that they were delivered… and [Colonel] Al Clark… would pick them up and hand deliver them to McMullen in Washington. Nobody, and I must stress this, no one was to discuss it with their wives, me with Ramey, with anyone.”

DuBose then called Blanchard and relayed the instructions to him. At that moment, the samples of the debris that Brazel had taken to the Chaves County Sheriff’s Office, and mentioned by Phyllis McGuire, were taken, under orders from Blanchard to the Roswell Army Air Field and eventually on to Fort Worth.

All this suggests that the officers at the Roswell Army Air Field were unable to identify the material as the remains of a weather balloon and a rawin radar target. There was nothing special about the weather balloon that would have fooled anyone who had seen it.

Wilcox thought enough of Brazel’s tale that he dispatched two deputies to the area of the crash. Brazel gave them directions, but given the nature of the terrain, and the distance from Roswell, the deputies failed to find the field, though they did find a large, circular burned area to the north of town.

Wilcox, who was unable to identify the debris, then called out to the Roswell Army Air Field to report what the rancher had found. The call eventually reached Major Jesse A. Marcel, Sr., the Air Intelligence Officer. He drove from the base to the sheriff’s office where he met with Brazel and was shown the debris that Brazel had brought with him.

Apparently, Marcel was unable to identify the material and thought it strange enough that he should investigate further. In consultation with the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, it was decided that Marcel should accompany Brazel back to the ranch. Blanchard mentioned the base had just acquired a counterintelligence office. He thought Marcel should take Captain Sheridan Cavitt, the officer in charge of that office, out to the ranch.

Marcel, had returned to the base, picked up Cavitt and then drove to the sheriff’s office. With Brazel leading the way, the small convoy, Brazel in his pickup, Marcel in his Buick, and Cavitt in a Jeep Carryall, arrived too late in the day to do much. They spent the night in a small house, and according to Marcel, had a later supper of beans.

The next morning, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt made their way to the Debris Field. Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long, and two to three hundred yards wide. Cavitt would tell Air Force investigator, Colonel Richard Weaver in 1994, that it was much smaller, no bigger than a large room in a house. More importantly, Cavitt would tell Weaver that the moment he saw the material, he recognized it as the remains of balloons. Weaver didn’t ask, and Cavitt didn’t explain, why he had not told Marcel this, nor why he didn’t mention to Blanchard when he returned to the base.

The misleadingly captioned claim that this array, including the rawin radar targets was launched by New
York University scientists on June 4, 1947. This was actually Flight No. 2, flown on the east coast.
The arrays launched in New Mexico were a third shorter and carried no rawin targets.

The actual make up of the array trains flown in New Mexico. Flight No. 4 had been cancelled, but 

Flight No. 5, designated as the first successful flight, was launched on June 5, 1947. There is no 

evidence that any rawin targets were used on it or most subsequent flights.

There is the other, important problem. Cavitt didn’t explain why he had been fooled by the debris in Roswell, but recognized it once he arrived on the ranch. Had the debris been part of Project Mogul, which was made up of off-the-shelf weather balloons and rawin radar targets, there is no reason for it to have fooled Brazel, Wilcox, and Marcel. Had it been part of Project Mogul, and recognized as balloon debris, there is no reason for the trip to the ranch and clean up wouldn’t have been all that difficult.

There is still another, important aspect to all this. The Project Mogul balloons were launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field. Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the experiments in New Mexico, kept records of the launches, and that record of his field notes, diary entries and final report are all available both online and in the massive Air Force report on the Roswell case. Based on all that data, we know that all Mogul flights prior to July 6, which is the date that Brazel drove into Roswell, were accounted for with the exception of Flight No. 4, which had been scheduled for launch on June 3, but postponed until June 4. Another attempt was made on the following morning. Crary's entry for this attempt said:

June 4 Wed

Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds. Flew regular sonobuoy mike up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on ground but poor on plane. Out with Thompson pm. Shot charges 1800 to 2400.

This provided the timing of the events in Alamogordo, and because of the regulations under which they operated, they were forced to cancel the flight. There is nothing ambiguous in the documentation. Flight No. 4 was cancelled. Later that morning, they flew a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy, but this wasn’t a full Mogul array and no evidence that the balloon cluster ever left the Alamogordo area.

To take this one step further, an examination of the documentation available in Crary’s notes, showed they weren’t using the rawin radar targets at this stage of their research. Flight No. 5, which flew the next day, June 5, did not have any radar targets on it, according to the illustrations available in the final reports. If there were no rawin targets attached to the flight, then where did the rawin originate that was displayed in General Ramey’s office. And, if there were no rawin targets, then isn’t that photograph taken in Ramey’s office evidence of a coverup?

There are pictures of an array being prepared that do show the rawin radar targets as part of the assembly but that photograph was taken on July 22, 1948, more than a year after the crash in Roswell. Another photograph, published on July 10, 1947, shows the launch of the two balloons, with but a single rawin target attached.

Here is where we are. The June 4, 1947, launch of Flight No. 4, was cancelled according to the documentation. Later in the day, there was the launch of a cluster of balloons, but this was not a full array. It was made up of the already inflated balloons and a sonobuoy to test the radio reception. There is no evidence that it left the Alamogordo area and no evidence that it contained a rawin radar target. Without Flight No. 4, the explanation of a Mogul balloon array accounting for the debris found by Mack Brazel, fails.

An alleged Mogul array being prepared for flight. This one was launched more than a year after the
cancelled June 4, Mogul Flight No. 4.

The date the photograph was taken, July 22, 1948.

The documentation, provided in the various field notes, diary entries, and other evidence, shows that rawin targets were not part of the arrays being launched in New Mexico, and if there were no such targets, then the balloon explanation fails at that point as well.

Although the Air Force claimed that Project Mogul was highly classified and that would account for those in Roswell being unable to identify the balloon is misleading. The ultimate purpose was classified, but the work being done in New Mexico was not. The newspaper articles published on July 10, 1947, proves this claim to be false.

With the elimination of the Mogul explanation, based on the overwhelming evidence that Flight No. 4 was cancelled, there is no terrestrial explanation for what fell on the Brazel managed ranch. Remember, the Air Force eliminated all other mundane explanations before settling on Mogul. There could be, somewhere, a super-secret project that would account for the debris, but no one has identified it yet, and it is difficult to believe that revelation of such a program would adversely affect national security in the world today. Had there been such an explanation, the Air Force would have used it years ago and the Roswell case would have been solved.

Until and unless, such a program or project is revealed and it can be shown to have scattered the debris in New Mexico, the only conclusion to be drawn is that whatever fell that day is unknown. To many, that leads directly to the extraterrestrial. The lack of evidence for the terrestrial does suggest something alien. Is sufficient to prove the case? That’s left up to the individual but it the most logical explanation at the moment.