Jesse Marcel's Journal - Update 1

A while back, we learned that Jesse Marcel, Sr., had kept some sort of journal that family members had just discovered. I wasn’t overly concerned with the length of time it took for this discovery. Just a couple of years ago I found a stack of letters my father had written home from the Pacific Theater during the Second World War. They had been in an old suitcase just passed from hand to hand in the family. I had no idea what was in it until I opened it.

Major Jesse Marcel

So, when the Marcel family said they had just located these journals, I wasn’t surprised nor did I think it was some sort of trick. They wanted to take time to review the information and gather the documentation to prove that the journals had been written by the senior Marcel long ago.

I said that when I learned anything new, I would report it here and I have learned something new. Months and months ago the family decided that they needed the help of a linguist who had a working knowledge of cryptic writing. They thought that something might be encoded in the journals that would be of interest because Marcel had been an intelligence officer.

Let me say here that I served in a position similar to that in which Marcel served. We were both air intelligence officers. True, our assignments had been decades apart… he in the late 1940s and me in the mid-1970s, but the jobs were essentially the same. I know this because I have read the unit histories of the military organizations with which he served. For example, in the Army, the verifications of the information supplied by the soldier for a security clearance fell to the intelligence officer. Marcel, according to the 509^th Unit History had been doing that in Roswell. Before we deployed to Iraq, I had been doing that for our unit. Similar tasks separated by decades.

I can, therefore, make a number of extrapolations about what Marcel would have been doing, and based on my experiences, know how the various assignments would have been completed. There was no point in which I was introduced to any sort of comprehensive training that would have involved cryptic writing. Sure, there were the basics covered in a couple of courses, but nothing that would have been beneficial in creating a code hidden in the context of an everyday, personal journal.

But none of that is extremely important. The mere question and then search for a linguist with a knowledge of cryptic writing tells us what we want to know. It tells us there is nothing in these journals that reference the UFO sighting, the crash, the retrieval or the recovery of alien bodies. If there was, there would be no reason to attempt to “read between the lines.” No need to search for hidden messages in the journal. If it is not obvious, then I suggest it is not there.

For those who think that Marcel would have been hiding this stuff because, at the time, it would have been classified and such a journal entry would be dangerous, I say, remember, he told what he knew. We, in the UFO community, didn’t learn about this until 1978, but he had been talking about it with his ham radio buddies prior to that. And we have no journal entries prior to that point that suggest the alien spacecraft. No, I fear this is another dead end, based solely on the query about a linguist and cryptic writing.

True, this is speculation based on a simple question asked by the members of the Marcel family, but it is also a worrisome question. If there had been anything mentioned in the journals that suggested the UFO crash, then the question wouldn’t have been necessary. That it was asked suggests that nothing was found that related to it.