Ralph Multer and the Roswell UFO Crash

Not all that long ago a couple of people asked me what I knew about this Ralph Multer guy. I hadn’t heard of him but did a little research and discovered he was about to be added to the list of Roswell witnesses. Well, not really. His family was saying that he had told them about his brush with the Roswell case so his name might be added but he wouldn’t be telling us anything new.

Multer, who was described by Ed Balint at CantonRep.com, as a blue-collar worker, a World War II veteran who had been wounded during the war and had participated in the Invasion of Iwo Jima, apparently told family before he died that he had seen something from another world. He was married young and worked at the Timken Company as a truck driver.

According to the family, he told them that he had hauled debris from the flying saucer crash for testing at the plant. He said he had been told, along with two fellow truck drivers to pick up a load from the rail yard. He said that three trucks, covered by tarps, carried the material to the Timken furnaces for testing. His truck had the largest of the loads.

When they arrived at the plant, the were met by the FBI agents. In an incredible breach of security, one of that agents told him that the metal had come from a flying saucer recovered in New Mexico. Multer was told by an FBI agent not to tell anyone about what he had seen. It was all highly classified.

According to the story, Multer talked to someone at the plant who told him that the metal couldn’t be cut and couldn’t be heated, let alone melted. It was lightweight and silver or gray, which isn’t much of a description.

This story apparently surfaced in the mid-1990s when William E. Jones and Irena McCammon Scott heard it from Multer’s widow. He died in 1982 without talking to anyone about it other than family. They, of course, believe it, insisting that Multer wasn’t a liar and didn’t tell tales.

So, what do we make of all this. Frankly, I’m quite skeptical of this story. Why? Because there is no reason for the Army to have taken that much debris to a private company to run these sorts of tests. The facilities at Wright Field, in 1947, could have run the tests and not risk compromising the case. Why take that chance?

And, of course, the testing was compromised by Multer. He told family about it, apparently all his life. He was told not to talk, but did anyway.

And here is something else. Why was the FBI involved at all? The Army could have assured that the truck drivers and all the other civilians were warned not to talk about the case. No reason to bring in the FBI or to let even more people in on the secret.

That’s why this case breaks down. There is no need to compromise security by using a civilian agency, no matter what sort of governmental contract work they might be doing, or had done. There was no reason to take three truckloads of the stuff to Timken for testing.

If you are attempting to keep a secret, you simply do not involve people who have no need to know. You don’t ship it to a location to be put on trucks to be driven to a civilian plant. You protect it carefully and run the tests in isolation on military facilities. You don’t involve the FBI or anyone else, if you can avoid that.

Ben Franklin said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. In this case, it seems that the Army was spreading the secret much farther than necessary.

And if they needed the special facilities at Timken to test the debris, there is absolutely no reason to tell the truck drivers what they are carrying. There is no reason to mention flying saucers or New Mexico. Just tell them it is a specialized aircraft from Dayton (location of Wright Field) and let it go at that.

In fact, there is no reason to give this information to the FBI agents. They could have done their jobs without knowing the material was from a crashed flying saucer in New Mexico. A cover story could have been invented... sort of like the Project Mogul story we’re saddled with today.

No, I am not buying this story, especially since there is no way to corroborate it. Without something more, we might want to note it in passing, but we certainly don’t want to add it to the lists of evidence proving Roswell was extraterrestrial. It doesn’t do that and it is an unnecessary diversion. Let’s just leave it at that.