The Roswell Deception - A Review

(Blogger’s Note: For those interested in more information about this, I interviewed James Carrion on my A Different Perspective radio show. You can listen to both hours here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/16732614

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/16732644

And for those who wish to read the book, you can find it here:

http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Books/Other/Carrion,%20James%20-%20The%20Roswell%20Deception.pdf

All this will provide information about Carrion’s theories, some of my thoughts on them, and additional points of view.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I have been involved in the investigation of the Roswell case for more than thirty years. I am deep into the minutia of the case and know where the mistakes were made and what witnesses are more than likely being less than candid. In other words, you might think that I

James Carrion. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle

bring bias to this examination of The Roswell Deception, but I believe I can view it in a very dispassionate light. I have tried to separate what might be considered a kneejerk reaction to a new theory that moves us beyond those which has been traditionally assigned to the Roswell case.

Before we begin, there are a few things that I want to make clear. Just looking at this book as an historical thesis, we are shown a history of the United States as it existed in the late 1940s. We are shown the paranoia that seemed to run rampant, the distrust of our one-time ally, the Soviet Union, and a belief that if our government did it, there are good reasons for it. This is all demonstrated through the newspaper articles and government documents that are linked to the book through the Internet.

There are “mini-biographies” of many of the people who populated the upper echelons of both the military and civilian worlds in the late 1940s. Those are interesting in and of themselves but some of them are irrelevant to understanding UFOs. To learn a little more about the men who were running things gives us an insight into the how and why of certain decisions were made but that doesn’t really help us understand the philosophy of the times.

There was a great deal of information about the use of deception during the Second World War. This included the use of faked divisions, rubber tanks and military vehicles, and radio traffic designed to convince the Germans that the coming invasion of France would be directed at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy as but one example. This was designed to prove that militaries, including the United States, had successfully engaged in deception in recent history.

Second, and of little importance, are a number of small errors that do suggest a problem with the overall scholarship. Walter Haut is continually referred to as Warren Haught, the name that so many newspapers used for him. I’m not sure why this wasn’t picked up and corrected. It doesn’t seem that Carrion realized this.

In keeping with misnamed people, Carrion refers to Major Curtan and provides information about Major Eugene Curtain (page 204). But this is irrelevant because the man in Fort Worth was Major Edwin M. Kirton. The FBI didn’t bother to get the correct spelling of the man’s name. They just assumed it was spelled “Curtan.”

Third, there were other things. COMINT, which is jargon for communications intelligence is defined as code breaking. True, code breaking is part of the COMINT mission, but it goes far beyond that. It is monitoring of communications, the interception of those communications and study of them. There are many aspects to COMINT.

Fourth, is the constant suggestion that the men of the 509^th Bomb Group were “handpicked.” There is no evidence that this is true, especially when we look at the unit rosters from the summer of 1947. Edwin Easley complained that his MPs were routinely rotated out of the group, to be replaced by others who now had to be trained in the procedures for handling the atomic weapons and secrets. There didn’t seem to be anyone handpicking them.

And there are assumptions that are not backed up by evidence. Often, we read about what the Soviet analysts would think about a flying saucer case, or how they would have interpreted certain information, but that is all speculation. At one point, Carrion wrote, “Astute Soviet intelligence analysts would have paid attention to the flying disc news reports quoting the anonymous Cal Tech physicist.” No documentation has been offered to prove that these assumptions are valid, and in some instances, we find them contradicted in later portions of the book.

Before we get too deep into the book, we are told, “…the flying saucer stories that proliferated in the summer of 1947 were part and parcel of a U.S. led strategic deception operation…that U.S. had amazing aerial technology… goals to stay Stalin’s hand from invading Europe, smoke out spies and to break Soviet codes…”

It is later in the book that we move back to the flying saucers beginning with an analysis of the motives behind the Kenneth Arnold sighting. This was one of those aerial deceptions that Carrion wrote about. Arnold, the man who launched the flying saucers, was lured into the area by a reward offered for finding the wreckage of a Marine aircraft that had crashed some months earlier, killing all aboard but that had not been located. The theory, according to Carrion, was that the military would be interested in the Pacific Northwest because this was the route that Soviet missiles would take during an attack. By providing an opportunity for someone, anyone, to see these radical new aircraft, in the Pacific Northwest, it would suggest to the Soviets that the U.S. capability was far superior than it actually was. This would prevent the Soviets from attacking Western Europe and by extension, the United States.

The flaw here is that the U.S. had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union did not. This would seem to be the real deterrent and this aerial deception was unnecessary. If the U.S. could obliterate the Soviet Union with those atomic weapons, that would keep the Soviets in check, at least until they developed their own atomic arsenal. Mutually assured destruction would stay their hand at that point. Carrion suggested that we had few actual bombs and that convincing the Soviets that we had a delivery system that they could not defeat was the real purpose.

But what was it that Arnold saw that was so radical that he didn’t recognize it as terrestrially based aircraft? According to Carrion (page 84), “Perhaps Arnold was not familiar with the flying wing designs which were tailless, even though they were

XB-35

not a military secret. Newspapers reported in May 1946 the test flight of three N9M flying wings… and Northrop’s giant XB-35 winged bomber…”

The problems with this are many. Only four N9Ms were built. One crashed in 1946, two had been detailed to the Air Force for training and by June 1947, it seems that only one was flying. These were test aircraft and only about a third the size of the XB-35, so it is debatable that had there been nine of them and they might not have been visible at the distance reported by Arnold.

As for the larger XB-35, in June, according to the documentation, there were only two in existence. According to the PIO at MUFOC Army Air Field, “None of our flying wings has been in the air recently.”

This seems to negate the idea that Arnold saw something that was part of an aerial deception, which undermines the theory in the book. If it wasn’t an aerial deception, then what Arnold saw has another explanation. Carrion counters by saying that they might have been towing something, though it is difficult to believe that the inherently unstable XB-35 would be capable of towing anything.

Carrion tells us (page 114), that the deceivers had anticipated that the Arnold story would be a “flash in the pan,” so they began feeding new sightings to reporters, which, according to Carrion’s theory, culminated in the Roswell case. This seems to suggest they anticipated Roswell, or had planned it in advance. This would keep flying saucers in the news. But the day after the Roswell crash was reported, the news was that both the Army and the Navy had moved to suppress news stories about flying saucers. Rather than encouraging the proliferation of flying saucer tales, they were trying to keep the media from publishing more about them.

But more importantly, Carrion offers no documentation and no evidence that anyone was watching the flying saucers with an eye to keeping the story alive. No evidence that the Soviets were interested in it, or that the aerial deception had been created to suggest a superior aircraft. In fact, there are news reports and speculation that the flying saucers were “… a Soviet plot to create US panic.” This is a Soviet aerial deception.

Carrion, in writing about the Roswell crash, noted, as did some newspapers, that there had been a “blistering rebuke” (page 201) to the 509^th subordinates for issuing the press release. Walter Haut, however, told me there had been no such rebuke. Maybe the press assumed it or maybe a spokesman said it, but those in Roswell were unaware of it. Karl Pflock, in his book (Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, page 290, reported that George Walsh had received a second call from Haut asking what he, Walsh, had done because he, Haut, had just received a call telling him to shut up. Of course, there is no documentation for

Walter Haut. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle

this either and it conflicts with what Haut himself had said repeatedly.

On that same page, Carrion wrote, “Something that didn’t smell right in this news article was the revelation that ‘not all the principals were satisfied with the announcement that the wreckage found on the New Mexico ranch was that of a weather balloon.’ Which principals? Making a baseless statement was borderline gaslighting the public.”

But the answer to that question is there in the newspapers. Mack Brazel, who found the original wreckage, was quoted as saying that he had found weather observation devices on two other occasions and this was nothing like those (Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947, page 1.)

Eventually we learn that “Lieutenant Warren Haught delivered two entirely different press releases to the local Associated Press and United Press outlets – a purposeful decision that will make sense later in the story.”

Which might be true if there were, in fact, two different press releases delivered to the media outlets in Roswell. Walter Haut told me that he wasn’t sure if he had, in fact, delivered the press releases in person. He might have read them over the telephone. Both George Walsh and Jud Roberts said that there was no hard copy of the release (and a news wire copy reported that the press release was verbal and not written). They received it over the telephone and since one of the recipients, Walsh worked for the AP and another, Frank Joyce, worked for the UP, it seems that this explains the subtle differences in the two. It was not some sort of clever deception to out spies or break codes but just the expected differences that would develop in the ways that the press release was distributed to the news wires and then published in the newspapers.

But there is a third version of the press release which, of course, suggests that Carrion’s claim is wrong. Haut provided the press release to the Roswell Daily Record. Their story is different than those reported by the UP and AP. In other words, rather than having been filtered through Walsh and Joyce, and then rewritten by editors at the two wire services and later by editors at the newspapers that reported it, the Roswell Daily Record had the information directly from Haut. They wrote their story based on what Haut told them and not what have been sent in to the wire services.

Carrion, however, suggests that this is unimportant how many press releases there were because all the key words were in both of them (A Different Perspective radio broadcast). That would allow for the code breaking operations to go forward… but, if there was actually no need for two or more releases, why even create them?

Later, we are told (page 248), “Bottom line being that Blanchard would never have unilaterally sent out the press release unless he was under orders to do so.”

A page later, Carrion wrote, “one question that has not been adequately answered however is who authorized the Roswell press release to be sent out. As it was highly unlikely that Colonel Blanchard pulled the trigger on this decision, UFO proponents shift the finger to SAC’s deputy Commanding General Clements McMullen.”

These are more bold statements that have no facts to back them up. Blanchard, as both the 509^th and the base commander, certainly had the authority to send out the press release. He was not required to ask permission from his higher

Colonel William Blanchard

headquarters. Notice that in one statement we are told he would never do it and in the next that it was highly unlikely. We are not told who these UFO proponents are.

Without actually supplying any documentation that the Soviets were at all interested in the Roswell crash, and with the story not only printed in newspapers all around the country, it was killed within three hours. It was claimed they had a flying saucer and then it was nothing more than a weather balloon and you have to ask, would the Soviet spies inside the United States actually be interested enough in this tale, as it developed, to transmit to Moscow using a code? Why not just send the information in the clear, referencing all the newspaper articles about it? No reason to encode it. Send clippings out in a diplomatic pouch because, once the explanation had been offered, there was no urgency to get the information to the Soviet Union. Carrion suggested to me that Stalin wanted the information fast and that couriers and diplomatic pouches would take too long (A Different Perspective radio broadcast).

Having provided an explanation for the Roswell crash, that is an aerial deception to fool the Soviets and a way of providing hints about Soviet codes, Carrion moves back to Kenneth Arnold. This time, however, Arnold isn’t the witness, he is the investigator. Ray Palmer, a Chicago publisher, wanted Arnold to investigate the Maury Island UFO incident. This was a semi-flying saucer crash. It was more of an emergency landing, but it resulted in damage to a fishing boat, the death of a dog, and injuries to the son of one of the men on the boat.

Maury Island is a notorious hoax. The investigation into it indirectly resulted in the deaths of two Army Air Forces officers. The aircraft they had used to travel to meet with Arnold developed engine trouble. It crashed after the crew chief and a passenger parachuted to safety. The pilots were unable to bail out and died in the crash.

All of this, from the Arnold sighting to Arnold’s investigation into Maury Island is an unnecessary diversion. Palmer, who had printed stories called the Shaver Mystery in his science fiction magazine, saw Arnold’s sighting as a way of validating some of those science fiction tales. The Shaver Mystery suggested a race hidden inside the Earth was responsible for all the troubles we face on the surface. The flying saucers were manifestations of craft used by those hidden away. Since the Shaver Mystery had been presented as truth hiding in fiction, and because these stories had boosted his circulation amazingly, Palmer wanted more. If the flying saucers could be tied to Shaver, then that would be best.

Arnold was to investigate Maury Island, the sighting reported by Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman. It has become clear over the years that Maury Island was a story invented by Dahl and Crisman to capitalize on the flying saucer craze of the moment. But there was an earlier connection. In 1946, Crisman had sent a letter to Palmer’s magazine suggesting that while he, Crisman, served in the China-Burma-India Theater during the Second World War, he had found one of the hidden caves that lead into the inner Earth. He could corroborate some of the Shaver Mystery with his first-hand observations.

All of this, about Maury Island and landed flying saucers, would have been ignored, if not for mystery calls made to newspapers about Arnold’s investigation of Maury Island. It seemed that the caller knew everything that was going on in Arnold’s hotel room as he interviewed the witnesses and discussed the matter with Captain E. J. Smith of United Airlines who’d had his own flying saucer sighting a few days earlier. This greatly disturbed both Arnold and Smith, and at one point, they nearly torn the room apart looking for hidden microphones.

But there were no hidden microphones and although the mystery caller was never identified, it is clear that it was either Dahl or Crisman. (On A Different Perspective, Carrion suggests that it was David Johnson). Given the nature of Crisman, he was probably the one making the calls. He never provided information to which he had not been privy. To prove he was on the inside, he was able to give the names of the two officers killed in the plane crash before they had been publicly released, but only because he had met them that day in Arnold’s room. Dahl and Crisman had tried to give the Army Air Forces officers some of the recovered residue from the damaged saucer but both officers knew what it was and it wasn’t part of a flying saucer. This is contrary to what Carrion suggested. George Early, in UFO, laid all this out in a series published in October, 2010; January 2011, and finally in October 2011.

The one very interesting point that comes out in all of this is that a fellow, David Johnson, had a large role in keeping the flying saucers in the newspapers. He seemed to have inserted himself into all Maury Island investigation through Arnold. Johnson, according to Carrion, singlehandedly convinced another newspaper reporter to push the Maury Island story out, over the news wire. Johnson was in communication with Arnold and knew Arnold’s plans. Johnson and Arnold would later go flying in search of the flying saucers, and Johnson would have his own sighting. If there was an outsider, a ringleader in this grand deception on a local level, then David Johnson would be a prime candidate for that. As I say, this is an interesting point made in Carrion’s book and on A Different Perspective. That alone might be enough for us all to take notice of it.

The one name that doesn’t surface in the book is that of Colonel Howard McCoy. He was involved with the Foo Fighters during the Second World War, he investigated the Ghost Rockets over Scandinavia in 1946, and then was a part of the early investigations of the flying saucers. He was an intelligence officer who seemed to be on the inside of everything, which makes him a candidate for the Roswell deception.

But the real point here is that contrary to Carrion’s belief that this was part of the grand deception, Maury Island was nothing more than a hoax carried about by two men who did not have sterling reputations and a Chicago publisher who wanted to boost his science fiction magazine’s circulation. They offered nothing that would be of interest to anyone other than those who thought the Shaver Mystery is real. The perpetrator of this was not some government organization but a magazine publisher who wanted to validate the Shaver Mystery to keep his circulation high. In this case, it was for the money.

This review could go on for much longer with these sorts of revelations. The problem for Carrion is that while he supplies links to interesting documentation, he has nothing that proves his case. He does not supply the smoking gun but suggests this lack of evidence is proof of it. He wrote, “The ‘perfect deception’ is a classic example. It is out there somewhere, but like the perfect crime, it manifests itself only in results. It is difficult to prove, and harder to study because quite often the study would attack comfortable beliefs.” (page 214)

Which is a way of saying that it must be true because we can’t prove it. We can only look at the results, but the results are inferred from documentation and information that is sometimes vague and sometimes irrelevant. The foundation is very weak and nearly nonexistent.

Worse still is what Carrion wrote early in his book. “Unfortunately, no U.S. strategic deception operations since WW2 have been declassified so I cannot offer official smoking gun documents that confirm unequivocally that the U.S. perpetrated strategic deception in the year of 1947…”

Carrion does provide an interesting history of the paranoid world of 1947, of the espionage going on by the United States as intelligence officials read all telegraph messages leaving the United States in something known as Operation Shamrock which was exposed decades ago. But all that does not lead us to an aerial deception of the magnitude claimed, that was designed to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe, to keep them from launching missiles over the Pacific Northwest and to help break the codes being used by Soviet agents.

He wrote that he was supplying a theory that could be falsified. In this case, we can say that Arnold had not been fooled by flying wing aircraft as part of an aerial deception because there were not sufficient flying wing aircraft to form a flight of nine. Of course, it might have been some other aircraft, or flying wing aircraft towing something, but again, the evidence does not support such a claim.

We can say that the Roswell press release was not part of a purposeful deception because there were not two purposeful versions. There was the single version that Haut supplied over the telephone and any variation of that version is the result of the communication over the telephone, the notes taken by those who received the calls, and the stylistic differences between the two wire services. Besides, with the information about the crash out in the public arena, and identified within three hours as a weather balloon, there would be no reason for Soviet spies to send a coded message about anything even if they thought there was something important there. In other words, the two purposeful versions did not exist and the documentation and testimony bears out this conclusion.

We can look at the Maury Island affair as a hoax dreamed up by two men with the assistance of Ray Palmer. It was a ploy to validate the Shaver Mystery and not some conspiracy by a secret government agency to convince the Soviets that we had superior military aircraft. Arnold was not part of the deception. He was just a handy foil for those perpetrating the hoax.

But in the end, Carrion admits that he provides a lot of speculation but no real evidence. While he challenges us to “falsify” his theory, to do so, we need access to still classified records of this grand deception. The problem is, such records might not exist and might never have existed. We can’t falsify the theory by proving an alternative to it because we need those records to do so.

The book is interesting for those of us interested in the minutia of the time, and the theory is clever, but it fails without any sort of evidence. Speculation is fine, but in the end, there is nothing left… the foundation is built on quick sand and rapidly collapses without the support necessary to make the case. Read the book for the history of time, for the information about the cases on which it touches, but remember that the theory is not proved.

James Carrion, The Roswell Deception and the Press Release

This is a different post than I had planned. After reading James Carrion’s The Roswell Deception, I was planning to do a short article about one tiny aspect of it. It was something that seemed to undermine his premise, but as I was searching for additional information, the tone changed and I made a discovery or two that I thought important.

James Carrion. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

To bring everyone up to speed on this, let me say, “This isn’t a review of The Roswell Deception. It is an analysis of a single statement that seems to be at odds with the facts, but it is an important discrepancy.”

For those who haven’t read the book, Carrion proposes that the flying saucer craze of 1947 including the crash of something near Roswell was a grand deception. It had two purposes. One was to convince the Soviets that we, meaning the United States, had an airplane that was far superior than anything the Soviets had. Military strategists had learned during the Second World War that control of the air was an important part of winning the war on the ground.

The second was to either expose Soviet spies in the United States, or to gather through the use of deception, information that would help break the codes that the Soviet Union was using. In time of war, not to mention during time of peace, being aware of the other side’s strengths, weaknesses and worries would help in any sort of negotiations. Knowing the enemy’s goals in advance would help to blunt them and, by extension, improve our position in the world.

These were the reasons for creating the aerial deceptions and the activities designed to keep it going. Carrion believed that the Roswell crash, and more importantly, the stories around it were necessary for the deception.

With that in mind, he wrote, “Lieutenant Warren Haught [Walter Haut… I don’t know why he couldn’t get the name right] delivered two entirely different press releases to the local Associated and United Press outlets – a purposeful decision that will make sense later in the story.”

The most obvious problem is the assertion that there were two different press releases and that it was purposeful. There is no evidence to support the idea that there was any sort of purposeful decision here. The evidence suggests otherwise and here’s why.

Simply, I have found more than two versions of the press release. There was one version that appeared on the United Press wire service, one that appeared on the Associated Press service, and still another version that appeared in The Roswell Daily Record. Many of the newspapers printed their own versions, rewritten by their reporters or editors to fit their formats and style.

For those interested, George Walsh of radio station KSWS was the first to get his version of the press release on the AP news wire at 2:26 p.m. (MST). It said:

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509^th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509^th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.

Frank Joyce, at radio station KGFL, followed about fifteen minutes later with the United Press version. It said:

KGFL Radio Station in the late 1940s.

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.

The last of the versions was published by the Roswell Daily Record. It is different than the other versions. It said:

The intelligence office of the 509^th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.

According to information released by the department, over the authority of Maj. J. A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises.

Major Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated.

After the intelligence office here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters.

The intelligence office stated that no details of the saucer’s construction or its appearance had been revealed.

Articles in other newspapers, especially those on the west coast, offered variations of the press releases. The Oroville, California Mercury-Register, for example, reported, “Possession of a ‘flying disc’ was disclosed today by the intelligence office of the 509^th bomb group of the Roswell army airbase.”

Walter Haut. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle.

An analysis from all these sources show that the same information is the basis for all of them, but there are subtle differences. This happened, I believe, because Walter Haut phoned it in, so to speak. Haut told me, as he had many others, that he wasn’t sure if he had hand carried the press release to the four media outlets in Roswell or if he telephoned each of them and read it to them. That would account for the subtle differences, at least partially.

Art McQuiddy, who in 1947, was the editor of the Roswell’s Morning Dispatch told me (see UFO Crash at Roswell, pp. 70 – 71; Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, p. 266), “I can remember quite a bit about what happened that day. It was about noon and Walter [Haut] brought in a press release… By the time Haut had gotten to me it hadn’t been ten minutes and the started ringing. I didn’t get off the hone until late afternoon.”

On the other hand, Karl Pflock in his book wrote (p. 244), “Among other things, they [teletype messages retained by Frank Joyce of the information communicated by the United Press] confirm Roswell AAF did not [emphasis in original] distribute a written press release on the Brazel discovery.”

Can we resolve this?

Yes. I think the answer is in the subtle differences found in each of the versions. Had Haut taken the press release into the various offices, then the content would be virtually the same. The big difference is with the version published in the Roswell Daily Record. It smacks of the local newspaper being familiar with the players, the locations, and the situation. Had they had a printed version of the

Roswell Daily Record. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle.

press release, their version would have followed those others with, of course, the local modifications.

There is another aspect of this. As I was looking for copies of both the AP and the UP versions, I was struck by a thought. I had been given, by Frank Joyce, copies of the wire service copy from 1947. There were Joyce’s notes written on it. I wondered, if in the early 1990s, after we’d talked to Joyce, and Moore had talked to Joyce, if maybe, Joyce had cobbled this together. He would have been familiar with the style of the news wires in 1947, he had moved from Roswell radio station, KGFL, up to Albuquerque’s KOB. He knew Haut and the boys in Roswell, so there was a possibility that he had been able to create something in coordination with Haut and the others that none of us would challenge.

And, more importantly, Joyce had told us, that is Don Schmitt and me, that within the days, possibly hours of the original press release, the military had come by KGFL and swept the office for any paper or evidence of the crash. Given that we were hearing about military attempts to suppress the information from a number of people, that just seemed to be a part of the larger picture.

It wasn’t until recently that I had another thought on this. If the military had searched the radio station, why hadn’t they taken the teletype messages that Joyce had saved. If he had hidden that material, why wasn’t the press release with it? And, why was the military even bothering with this? The story was out and the press release, maybe not verbatim, but close enough to the original had already been circulated so that it was of no importance. We knew, pretty much, what it said.

Given all this, I believe that we can conclude that Haut didn’t visit each place, but used the telephone. Art McQuiddy might believe that Haut visited him, but he would be wrong about that. When I interviewed Jud Roberts about running into the military cordon of the area, he told me that there had been a blue staff car parked by the side of the road. In July 1947, the staff cars would have been green, given this was the Army. It wasn’t until after the Air Force became a separate service that the staff cars would have been painted blue. Was Roberts lying? No, he had just spent decades looking at Air Force blue cars. The point is that he might have actually remembered the staff car by the side of the road, but in his mind it was blue.

We can conclude, then, based on the evidence, based on Walter Haut’s vague memory, and the information printed in the newspapers, that there might have been a written press release that Haut read to the media sources over the telephone. However, if he was working from notes rather than a completed release, then we can see that there would have been other, subtle differences interjected in the press release.

As for the original reason to begin this rather esoteric look at that one paragraph that Carrion wrote, we conclude that Carrion was wrong as well. There weren’t two different press releases issued as a way of exposing Soviet spies or as a means of cracking Soviet codes. There was a single press release, delivered over the telephone that created the differences. And from that point, the newspapers updated, edited, and added to the press release meaning that there weren’t two versions, but many. On this point, Carrion’s theory about two press releases, fails.

Roswell Documentation vs. Roswell Eyewitnesses

Since I have now annoyed all my friends with my analysis of the Roswell documentation and how some of it is quite suggestive that nothing alien fell there, I thought it time to annoy all my skeptical friends. Lining up against that documentation is the testimony of some people who were on the scene in 1947. This is based on the documentation we can find about them and the stories they tell us in the world today.

Walter Haut, for example, either wrote the press release claiming the 509^th had found a flying saucer, or he took the dictation from Colonel William Blanchard to create the press release. At this point it doesn’t really matter. The press release

Walter Haut being interviewed.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

was issued and it claimed they had “captured” a flying saucer in the Roswell region. The definition of flying saucer confuses the issue, because in 1947, there was no universally accepted definition. It could mean almost anything you wanted it to mean. But here’s the deal. It is vague to the point of being opaque. We don’t know what it means.

I have never understood the reason for the press release. If Blanchard was attempting to grab credit for solving the flying disk mystery, the press release was unnecessarily obscure. Compare it to the story out of Circleville, Ohio, in which a farmer found the remains of a weather balloon and rawin reflector on his land. We have a story in the local paper that identifies the farmer as Sherman Campbell and includes what is claimed a picture of his wife. When I talked to the family, I learned it was actually his daughter holding the rawin target. The point is that the Circleville newspaper story was clear and it included a photograph. The Roswell press release told us nothing of real importance, provided little in the way of verification and had no photograph.

We do have testimony from Haut, which, if we limit it to what was said in the press release, and what he said to us for decades before expanding his story, we learn that what was found was something strange. No, it tells us nothing about the alien nature of the crash, just tells us that Blanchard and company were perplexed by something they should have been able to identify easily if it was a weather balloon. No reason not to supply the explanation if it was something mundane, like was done in Circleville.

If we wish to get to the extraterrestrial, then there is Edwin Easley, who was the provost marshal (please note the proper spelling of marshal here) in Roswell. When I asked him if we were following the right path, he asked what I meant by that. I told him that we (meaning Don Schmitt and I) believed that the craft had been extraterrestrial. He said, “Well, let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path.”

Taking that a step farther, he told family members about the alien “creatures.” That was his word to them, not mine. Sure, that statement is second hand at best because we learned it talking to family members, but hey, it does confirm his mindset on this.

No, there is no reason for Easley to have lied about it. He was very reluctant to talk, didn’t grant much in the way of interviews, and you won’t see him showing up in any of the old documentaries. I was always of the impression he wished to help me, but he had taken an oath in 1947 and he wasn’t going to break the oath.

There is Joe Briley, the operations officer in 1947. He said a couple of things that don’t take us directly to the extraterrestrial but do lead us to the highly unusual. He told me, when I mentioned, “…You heard the stories…” that “And then the story was changed immediately. As soon as the people from Washington arrived.”

Jesse Marcel

Yes, it is clear from the conversation on the tape that we’re talking about the UFO crash tale. I really don’t say anything specifically about it, but Briley knew why I had called him. In fact, later in the interview, he told me, “I just was not brought into that at all even though Butch [Blanchard] and I were extremely close.”

And later still, he said, “I don’t think Butch was stupid enough to call a weather balloon something else.”

Okay, this doesn’t get us to the extraterrestrial, but it does move us away from the conventional. It suggests things in Roswell were, well, up in the air in 1947.

I haven’t touched on Jesse Marcel, Sr. yet. He was quite clear in his statements about what had happened. There are any number of videos of him telling us that it was something “that wasn’t built on Earth but it had come to Earth.”

If he was stand alone, we could certainly dismiss his testimony. But it is not and while it is true that he seemed to drift all over the place before he died, he did say some provocative things about what he had seen and had done. These were backed up by his son and his wife. Still, we need to sound a note of caution when dealing with the senior Marcel.

Before this gets too long, let’s move onto Bill Brazel. Here was another man

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the debris field.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

extremely reluctant to talk about what he had seen. He did find a few scraps of the material that his father, Mack, described as having come from “that contraption I found.”

This debris included something that resembled fiber optics, a lead foil that seemed to have a memory, returning to its original shape when crumpled, and something that was as light a balsa but with a strength that rivaled steel. Although he lost the debris to Air Force personnel in 1949, he did show it to several others including Sallye Tadolini. Some of these witnesses, who handled the debris have affidavits about it.

Of course, Mack had shown a bit of the debris to Floyd and Loretta Proctor. She told me about the fire-resistant capabilities of the material. She mentioned, as did Marian Strickland, that Mack had been held by the military authorities for a number of days.

And I don’t want to forget Bill Rickett, the CIC NCOIC in Roswell in July 1947. He talked about his trip to see the crash site, some of the debris that he saw there, and some of the people on the scene including Sheridan Cavitt and Edwin Easley.

Here I could mention Frankie Rowe who wasn’t lying about what she said. True, she is second hand, having heard about the crash and the creatures from her father, fire fighter Dan Dwyer. But her sister confirmed the story and ironically, one of the fire fighters who Karl Pflock interviewed and used to dismiss the story,

Karl Pflock

actually told me, that Dwyer had gone to the crash site in his private car. The fire fighter, C.J. Smith, told me about Dwyer’s trip when I asked, simply, “Did you know Dan Dwyer.” Smith’s response was, “He went out there in his car.”

These are some of the things that I think about when I’m not worrying about the documents that I mentioned in the last post. Most of the people mentioned here, and a dozen or two more that I could have brought up argue against the documents conclusion. While it is true that a few people might be inventing their tales, and we’ve had more than our share of them, there are some very solid people who had talked about their involvement. If I’m willing to concede some points based on the documentation, it seems only right that those at the other end of the spectrum admit that there are some disturbing testimonies. They all aren’t lying, looking for their fifteen minutes, and just wishing to have an interesting story to tell.

Oh, and before this degenerates into another long discussion about the foibles of human memory… yeah, I get it. But not all memories are flawed and inaccurate. Many times, the person gets the facts right as has been shown by numerous scientific investigations, and yes, I know about Elizabeth Loftus’ work on false memory. Her work demonstrates how such memories can be created, so we don’t really have to talk about that. We just have to remember that sometimes, the person relating the tale has the details right, was actually there, and is telling the truth as best he or she can…

Why I'm Beginning to Dislike the UFO Field - Part Four

I was going through old files with an eye to weeding out the nonsense, the useless, the outdated and the duplications. As I was doing that, I turned over a newsletter from December 1996 and on the back found a note that I hadn’t seen before. It explained that I hadn’t been invited to participate in the Roswell 1997 celebration because I had libeled someone. My first reaction was that is a strange barb to throw at me considering all the false allegations that had been tossed my way over the years, including some from those on the committee to invite the speakers to the celebration.

But, I got to thinking about this and wondered to what it could refer. Back in that era, 1997, I did a monthly column for the Roswell Daily Record about all things UFO. I was asked to provide the column and I received no pay for it. I just thought it was a good avenue to promote the UFO situation as I understood it and to expose some of the nonsense that lingered in the field.

At one point, in that time frame, I was in the newspaper office when one of the editors approached me saying that they couldn’t run the latest column. I had libeled Dr. Donald Menzel in it. I pointed out that I had libeled no one and what I had written about Menzel was true… an absolute defense in a case of libel.

He didn’t want to debate the point even when I said that I could offer the evidence. He didn’t care because he saw it as libel. I then said that you can’t libel the dead and that since Menzel was a public figure, the threshold for libel was much higher. He didn’t care about that either and I told him he was free to print the column or reject it but I hadn’t libeled Menzel or anyone else.

And then I wondered if this could refer to the stories told by Gerald Anderson, he of the Plains of San Agustin crash. He claimed as a small boy he had been on the crash site and told a wonderful story about it, giving us the name of the archaeologist who was there, Dr. Winfred Buskirk. We, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, located Buskirk so that we had the chance to interview him. Buskirk, of course, said that he hadn’t been on the Plains in July 1947 because he was in Arizona doing research for his Ph.D. thesis. When I talked to Buskirk, he said that he had been a teacher at the Albuquerque High School and according to the school records, Anderson had been in his archaeology class… We had now connected Buskirk and Anderson, not on the Plains of San Agustin in 1947 but in the Albuquerque High School about ten years later.

Anderson, of course, denied the connection and even produced a Xerox copy of his high school transcript to prove he hadn’t taken Buskirk’s class but the real point is that we had put them into the same school at the same time. When we asked for a copy of that alleged transcript to be sent directly to a disinterested third party for verification, Anderson absolutely refused. It was obvious to most of us that Anderson had modified the transcript to validate his claim and actually hadn’t been very clever about it.

So, I was telling people that Anderson had lied about his high school class and his high school association with Buskirk. It was obvious that he had forged this document (and I have other documents that he forged as well) and it was clear that his tale of seeing a crashed alien craft on the Plains was complete fabrication. I was calling him a liar in the hopes he would sue me for saying those things. In discovery, as part of the lawsuit process, I would be able to get an official high school transcript to prove that Anderson was in Buskirk’s class and Anderson knew that would happen.

While it could be claimed that I had, in fact, libeled those people, the truth was a little more complicated than that. As I mentioned, the truth is an absolute defense so that all I had to prove was that Anderson had lied, and I had the documentation to prove it. The real problem was somewhat deeper than that.

From the left, Don Schmitt, Walter Haut and Max
Littell. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Around that same time, I was in the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. Max Littell, one of the founding members along with Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, came flying out of a back-office yelling that I was only in this for the money and that I wrote science fiction (I wonder where he had heard that?).

Truth be told, in all the various presentations I had made in Roswell, I always returned the honorarium to the hosts, taking only my expenses, except for the last time. I don’t know of any other researcher who has done this, and at the time Littell was shouting at me, I had not only donated money to the museum, I had arranged for a set of UFO magazines to be donated to them, which, of course meant that I had paid for them… and I never received a thank you for any of that.

But Littell had a bee in his bonnet about something and continued to make false statements. I think it all relates to the Jim Ragsdale tale that Littell began to push around that time. Ragsdale claimed that he had seen the object fall, had seen the bodies of the alien creatures, and had witnessed the military retrieval operation. Littell and Ragsdale entered into some sort of financial arrangement with an eye to developing the land where this alleged UFO fell. The trouble was that the site Ragsdale originally pinpointed was not the site that he and Littell were pushing at the time. I was a thorn in that idea because I knew what Ragsdale had originally said and had a tape of that interview. Later, it became clear that the Ragsdale tale was just that, a tale, with no basis in reality but in 1997 the financial rewards for Littell and Ragsdale were great. They had collaborated on a booklet about the case. Littell’s assault seemed to have grown out of that.

The point here isn’t all the nastiness involved, not to mention the false allegations about money or the suggestion that somehow writing science fiction disqualified me from UFO research (an allegation that only seems to apply to me because I had never heard any other researcher who has written science fiction to be disqualified by that same allegation).

The real point here is that you must toe the party line. You are not allowed to suggest that something might not be as accurate as thought and you must never question a witness story. You are required to believe it, all aspects of it, no matter how strange or ridiculous it has become. Deviate from that and you are a “debunker” whose mission is to divert attention from the truth, a pawn of the CIA, probably on their payroll, and to undermine the true stories being told that suggest alien visitation. Never mind where the evidence points, you are required to embrace it all whether it is crop circles, cattle mutilations, abductions, contact with the space brethren or any of the other sub-genres that can be appended to the UFO field.

I’m not sure who planted the story that I libel people, but I have a very good idea who it was. It was just another attempt to destroy my credibility because I didn’t happen to agree with some of his beliefs about UFOs.

As I mentioned earlier, this all began when I found that note on the back of a newsletter. I just thought I would mention it in the off chance that we all might be able to reduce the animosity in the field even if we disagree with one another, but I have little hope of that happening, given some of the emails I have received in the last few days… oh, I don’t take them seriously… I do read them and save them because you just never know when something said by someone in those emails will become important in proving a point at a later date. 

Walter Haut - Lost in the Roswell Minutae

Over the years Walter Haut made many recorded statements about what he had done and seen in Roswell in July, 1947. For decades, all he had done, according to those statements, including many to me, was write the press release. He had taken that release to the various media outlets in Roswell… or he had called them and read the release to them over the telephone. He signed an affidavit to that effect and told the story to dozens of UFO researchers, reporters and documentary producers.

Walter Haut on the set of "Roswell."
Photo copyright Kevin D. Randle

On April 20, 1989, I talked to Haut briefly. I was asking about the events there in Roswell and he was answering with one word answers which weren’t rude, just brief. Telling me again of the event and how he hadn’t done all that much, he finally said, “I hate to be that way but…” meaning just falling back on his standard answers including that his only role was to write the press release.

In May, 1993, he created and signed an affidavit saying basically the same thing. He had written the press release, and that was it. That was all he knew. That was his only involvement in the case.

But then, in 2000, he began to hint that he had seen more. He told Wendy Connors and Dennis Balthaser that he had been heavily involved. He later signed an affidavit prepared by Don Schmitt suggesting he had seen the remains of the craft and he had seen one of the bodies, or maybe more of them, it all just depended on which statement you heard. He had kept the secret as he had promised back in 1947 and he didn’t want this new affidavit released until after his death, though he certainly hadn’t been overly quiet about these new claims. Here, now, was an affidavit by one of the officers allegedly included in the inside circle of the staff, signing a legal document that suggested he had seen alien beings. It was an extraordinary document if it could be believed.

In the last couple of years, I have been looking through the files, documents, transcripts and newspaper clippings that I have collected over the years concerning the Roswell case. I have, literally, file cabinets filled with the information so that my review has not been as fast as it could have been.

The problem I found concerning Haut is not that his earlier statements contradict his later statements, but that his later statements were highly confused and highly contradictory. Haut is on the record in too many places saying that all he did was write the press release. In fact, in one of those earlier interviews filmed in 1979, Haut said, “Colonel Blanchard told [me] to put out [a] news release concerning [the] flying disc but that [I] couldn’t see it…”

In listening to people describing what they had seen and done, you sometimes hear what are often termed as “weasel words.” This means that they don’t want to lie but they are attempting to avoid the truth. Frank Kaufmann was skilled at this. He was famous for saying, “Well, I think so…” Not that something was true, but that “I think so.”

But this statement by Haut, made on film in 1979, is quite definitive. Haut was saying that Blanchard was not allowing him to see it. No flipping or flopping but a strong, positive statement that he stayed with for more than two decades.

Compare that statement to those made in the interviews conducted after 2000, where he was saying that he had only written the press release and then saying he had seen a craft and the bodies. Or that he had seen one body and then back to the original idea that he had only written the press release. He would often contradict himself within a single paragraph and sometimes in a single sentence. Anyone seeing these confused interviews would be concerned about the clear and concise statements in that later affidavit. It is just too perfect given how those statements have been gathered after 2000.

This one quote, “but that [I] couldn’t see it,” tells us a great deal and I would suggest that it tends to render that later affidavit as inaccurate at best. It would seem that it suggests we should reject the affidavit in light of what he had said for decades. I don’t know the motivation for his changing his mind about it. All I know is that I find the original statements, especially that about not being allowed to see “it” as much more persuasive than this affidavit cobbled together from what seem to be the ramblings of a witness more than half a century after the event. One statement was clear and concise and said many times and the other was something that came more than a half century after the fact and wasn’t all that clear . But then, it really comes down to what you wish to believe and which statements you trust the most. For me it is those given for so many years and not those that came so late in the game.