Jesse Marcel, James McAndrew and Me

I recently had the chance to sit down with Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr. (seen here) and we had a chance to talk about many things including some new stuff about the Roswell UFO case. Well, relatively new anyway.

Back in the mid-1990s, as the Air Force claimed to be investigating the Roswell UFO crash story, one of the officers, First Lieutenant (later captain) James McAndrew, called many of the witnesses and many of the investigators to talk with them. I spoke to him on a number of occasions and the tone was normally him trying to convince me to admit that I was only in it for the money. He told me that no one would think any less of me if that was the case. People would understand the motive.

I told him that I would have conducted the investigation and written the books if there had been no money involved. This was an important story and one that needed to be told. I pointed out that I had tapes of most of my interviews and that I would give him the telephone numbers of many of the important witnesses. This was all he needed to do to verify that what I reported was what they had said.

Yes, I fully understood that having taped interviews didn’t mean that the witnesses were telling the truth, but it would prove that I had reported accurately what I had been told. And yes, we tried to verify the information which is why I didn’t report about the former Air Force pilot who had been one of the alternate pilots on Air Force One, who had flown the aircraft when President Kennedy was on board, and that he had taken the president to see the bodies.

I found the pilot and yes, he had been an Air Force officer and yes, he had flown President Kennedy on Air Force One and yes he had seen an alien creature. However, he had not flown the president to a location to see alien bodies. He had been flying a fighter when he had seen a craft off his wing and inside the domed structure he had seen a creature. So, all the elements were there, they just didn’t add up to the whole that we had been told.

What was interesting about McAndrew was that he wasn’t interested in the tapes. He didn’t want to talk to the high-ranking military officers. He was more interested in telling me that he KNEW I was in it for the money. Not the truth but his belief.

Now, over the weekend, at the MUFON conference put on by the Illinois chapter of MUFON and hosted by Sam and Julie Maranto (seen here), I spent time with Jesse Marcel. It was late on the last day when the topic of McAndrew came up at the question and answer session held by all the presenters. I mentioned that McAndrew wanted me to flip and that he wasn’t interested in the tapes and telephone numbers of some of the key witnesses. I figured the Air Force didn’t want to be in the position of calling high-ranking officers, including one brigadier general, liars at best. This whole thing might suggest that the Air Force was lead by incompetents.

Jesse mentioned that McAndrew had called him several times and always pressed him on the details, suggesting mistakes. Jesse always told me that it hadn’t been a balloon. The debris he held and the debris he saw was not part of a balloon, or a balloon structure, or a Project Mogul array. It was strange stuff that was very lightweight and very strong. He didn’t know what it was.

Jesse then said at the end of the last call, McAndrew said, "Well, Colonel, we don’t know what you saw."

When you think about it, that’s an important statement. Here was McAndrew, trying to convince Jesse that he had seen parts of a Mogul array, trying to convince him of the new Air Force answer about the Roswell UFO crash, and finally admitting that he didn’t know what Jesse saw.

No, this doesn’t mean that McAndrew was conceding to Jesse that it was an alien spacecraft or anything else. It just means that McAndrew was admitting that he didn’t know what Jesse had seen (Jesse Marcel holding a replicate of one of the I-beams).

I will note here that the Air Force, in their investigation, did not report on all the interviews they had conducted with the researchers, with the witnesses and with the former and retired officers. Instead they focused on the members of Project Mogul, the civilians who launched the balloons in New Mexico, and Sheridan Cavitt, the Counter-intelligence Corps officer who lied about where he was in July 1947 but told the Air Force just what they wanted to hear.

And now we learn that the chief investigator told Jesse Marcel that he didn’t know what Jesse had seen. This seems to be a curious admission for the man. A moment of honesty hidden in all that governmental deceit.

Of course I know why they worked so hard to prove that Roswell was a balloon and not an alien craft. No matter what they said today, they were going to look bad and in any case they would be painting some top officials as liars. True, the lies might have been justified because of national security considerations, but they were lies nonetheless.

We have one new bit of information that doesn’t mean all that much in the overall picture, but does provide a glimpse into the background. The man who would be pushing the Mogul answer telling a witness that, "Colonel, we don’t know what you saw."