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" Mogul Illustration?

 

Yeah, I know that I said that I wouldn’t say anything more about Project Mogul because, to me, that explanation simply does not work. There is too much that argues against it, two of the facts being that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled and that the early flights in New Mexico did not contain any rawin radar reflectors as part of the array. If there were no rawins, then the explanation failed at that point.

However, I then found a website that devoted a segment to the Roswell case and used an illustration from New York University that was labeled “Typical radar target flight train used by the NYU balloon group in 1947.” As you can see, it matches none of the other illustrations for Project Mogul.

The website didn’t provide much in the way of a source, but indicated that it came from the massive Air Force report, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. It was included in the section that contained the interview with Charles Moore but it doesn’t tell us anything else about the original source of the illustration.

I have been through, page by freaking page, of the technical reports and other documentation about Project Mogul and the operations in Alamogordo. I have seen, literally, dozens of illustrations and photographs of those balloon arrays launched there in June and July 1947, that this new illustration matches none of that.

The only thing I have found that remotely matches is a picture from the Alamogordo News on July 10 that shows two weather balloons and two rawin targets about to be launched. Moore told me that the ladder in that picture was one that he had bought with petty cash. The only copies of that photograph that I have are poor quality reproductions from a copy machine.

Center picture shows weather balloons and rawin targets.

The question that arises, given all the data that I have seen about Project Mogul, and all the interviews I had with Charles Moore, not to mention discussions with James McAndrew and interviews with Colonel Richard Weaver, is where were these radar target trains launched, and more importantly, when.

I will note here that had Mack Brazel found one of these, which contained three to five balloons and three rawin targets (though I don’t know why they’re need three), he would have been able to pick up the debris in a few minutes. He wouldn’t have been worried about someone cleaning up the big mess that was the motivation for the trip into Roswell.

I will also note that upon landing, there were be no reason for the targets to be ripped up into pieces as shown in the pictures in General Ramey’s office. In fact, we do have pictures from a balloon landing near Circleville, Ohio, in early July and the rawin was recovered virtually intact.

Daughter of Sherman Campbell holding the
rawin target he found in his field

The real questions about this illustration is where is the original source, were there other NYU balloon projects in New Mexico in 1947, and when were these small clusters of balloons launched? This seems to be one of the many red herrings (is this now an offensive term for some maligned group?) that have been floated (pun intended) about the UFO crash in New Mexico.

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.

BG Schulgen and His Memo

The other day Fran Ridge who hosts the NICAP web site, posted the following to members of the list:

I just wanted to ask all of you if you consider the ACTUAL Shulgen memo as indicative of Roswell knowledge.

3. Items of Construction

a. Type of material, whether metal, ferrous, non-ferrous, or non-metallic.

b. Composite or sandwich construction utilizing various combinations of metals, plastics, and perhaps balsa wood.

c. Unusual fabrication methods to achieve extreme light weight and structural stability particularly in connection with great capacity for fuel storage.

It is a complicated question and one that caused me a lot of thought. For example, why would this mention balsa wood? It is not a suitable material for constructing aircraft, except for models. It is light weight but not very strong. Why would they

Schulgen

include it in a list of materials used in the construction of any aircraft expect for some small, internal components though I can’t think of any them.

For the first part, the question about the type of material seems to be straight forward and we all know that metals, both ferrous and non-ferrous have been used in the construction of aircraft. Plastics, wood, and other material have also been used. Aircraft from the early days were often had a wooden frame covered with canvas or other clothe-like materials and then painted. By the time of the Schulgen memo (Schulgen was a brigadier general who had an interest in flying disks and was responsible for an early staff study of them that results in the Twining letter), aircraft were mostly metal and far more powerful and complex than those from the beginning of flight.

When I look at the third part, about the unusual fabrication methods, I can still see this as responding to some of the information that might have been captured during the Second World War and later from some of the work done by Soviet scientists. This might be a response to what the Nazis had attempted to develop, especially in their desire to attack the United States where weight and fuel would be a real consideration.

Where I stumble is this mention of balsa wood. While the idea of composites has been around for, literally, centuries, their use in the construction of aircraft, seems to be a natural outgrowth of the search for light weight, strong materials. All of this can be seen as thinking of a terrestrial nature and need not to have been inspired by anything recovered at Roswell… that is, until we hit the balsa wood.

If the Roswell answer, or rather the recovery of debris, included balsa wood strips, and if the nature of the recovery was not immediately understood, then a question about balsa makes some sense. But then you move to the rawin targets, which did include balsa structural members and there was nothing extraordinary or secret about their use in connection with balloon flights. They were being used by weather offices all over the United States.

Everything there makes sense when looking at terrestrial craft with the exception of the balsa wood. Some of those who handled the debris recovered at Roswell commented on the light weight, strong material they held. Bill Brazel said that it was light, like balsa wood, but extremely tough and was certainly not balsa.

So, the one point that stands out here is the reference to balsa. There are a couple of reasons to include that note, one suggesting a balloon as the solution and another that suggests something very advanced. In one case, I don’t see Schulgen as including it on the list because it would be clear that it was unsuitable for any sort of manned craft. On the other hand, if we’re talking about something that was balsa like, then that might suggest a connection to Roswell.

But in the end, I don’t think this is connected directly to Roswell. The information asked for is the sort of information you would expect in such an intelligence gathering function.

This and That

As many of you know, I have been reviewing a large number of UFO files and have found some things that don’t warrant a complete blog post but that are interesting. For example, Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico was not named for Roger Ramey but for Brigadier General Howard Knox Ramey. This Ramey learned to fly in 1918 and by the time the Second World War broke out he had moved up the ranks. In

BG Howard Knox Ramey

January 1943 he was named the commanding officer of the V (Fifth) Bomber Command. In March 1943 while on a reconnaissance fight over the Torres Strait he disappeared. Neither his body nor any wreckage from the aircraft were found. If I had to guess, I would say that the Japanese spotted his aircraft and shot it down. 

The point is that Ramey Air Force Base was named for him, contrary to what some others have suggested. Roger Ramey’s widow told me it had not been named for her husband when I asked her about that in the early 1990s.

Here's something that a number of people might have seen but it might not have registered with them. In the Roswell Daily Record of July 9, in the article entitled, “Ramey Says Excitement Not Justified,” which, of course is his answer to the Roswell debris, there is a paragraph toward the end that says, “A public relations officer here said the balloon was in his office ‘and it will probably stay right there.’”

Although the article is in the Roswell newspaper, the dateline is Fort Worth which means the public information officer who was quoted is not Walter Haut but probably Major Charles A. Cashon, the 8^th Air Force PIO. (There are those who suggest that I haven’t carried out a complete investigation of the Roswell case, so, to prove a point, I will tell you that Cashon was not rated as flight crew and that his address in 1947 was Rt. 1, Box 220, Weatherford, TX, which was about a thirty-minute drive from the base.) This tells us where the debris from Ramey’s office went once he was done showing it to the press, though I wonder why Cashon would want it cluttering up his office and why no one bothered to take additional pictures (Oh, wait, this was 1947 when cameras were expensive and film was expensive and no one cared about a wrecked weather balloon anyway).

Speaking of balloons, Irving Newton, the warrant office who “identified” the balloon for Ramey and the press, said that he knew immediately that is was a balloon, though in interviews he said a colonel had met him before he got to Ramey’s office. Newton said the colonel told him they thought it was a weather balloon and wanted him to identify it (does leading the witness count here?) Anyway, Newton, in a February 20, 1995 letter to me, wrote, “The Rawin target and balloon in question was only used at limited locations and to my knowledge not at Fort Worth, not even all weather personnel were familiar with them, but we used them at Tinker Field (Okla City) during training and for Atomic tests…”

Atomic tests like that of Operation Crossroads in which the 509^th Bomb Group participated including Jesse Marcel. And, according to the L. J. Guthrie, of the Roswell weather station, they had been “dabbling with radar controlled balloons,” (which strikes me as a load… radar controlled balloons?) and that he believed based on the descriptions, what Brazel found could have been one of theirs. An Albuquerque weatherman said that they launched rawins with the weather balloons as well.

None of that proves much one way or another. I just thought these various items about the balloons or more specifically the rawin from Ramey’s office landing in the possession of Cashon to be interesting.

I thought I would just throw this information out there. I’m sure that I have opened the gates to all those who need to question absolutely everything even if there is nothing very controversial in the comments here. These are just little bits of information that probably add nothing to our overall understanding but I found them somewhat amusing.

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.