Jesse Marcel's Journal - Update 2

The other day I was discussing the latest update on the Jesse Marcel, Sr. journal (or journals) and had a thought or two about it. I had mentioned that nothing being found in the journals for 1947 wouldn’t be all that surprising because it was, well, 1947, and Marcel was still in the military. Had there been a crash, and from what others had said, they were all cautioned about sharing of classified material with those who weren’t cleared to receive it.

It was pointed out that he had been talking about it in 1978. I thought that point irrelevant because so much time had passed. No mention in a 1947 journal wasn’t that important (unless, of course there was one) but no mention in journals written

Major Jesse Marcel

later, especially prior to 1978, could be very important.

But that wasn’t the important revelation. It was the sudden thought that when Marcel told Friedman about picking up the pieces of a flying saucer, he, Marcel, couldn’t remember what year it was. It wasn’t until Bill Moore, looking for information about the beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947 found pictures of Marcel kneeling near the remains of a weather balloon in General Ramey’s office, that the information fell into place.

I wondered, if Marcel had journals, then why had he been unable to give Friedman the date of the sighting? True, he might not have had the journal at his fingertips when Friedman called, but surely, he would have been able to look that up… if he had a journal.

That raises a second question. If he was keeping journals, then why didn’t he have copies of some of the newspaper articles in which he was quoted? If nothing else, maybe a notation that his name had appeared in the newspapers. It isn’t every day that ordinary people find themselves mentioned in the newspaper.  Or, at the very least, a mention that he had his name in the newspaper on July 8, 1947. True, that tells us nothing about the validity of alien aspect of the crash, but it would be something… Even a mention of the balloon explanation would be something, such as found in the 509^th Unit History.

Sure, I get that Marcel might have been embarrassed by the outcome, but there was really nothing in those articles that suggested he had made a horrible mistake. Just that he had recovered debris, taken it into Roswell and then onto Fort Worth, on the orders of his superiors, who, by the way, failed to identify the balloon in Roswell if we accept that whole story.

Anyway, all this speculation is based on a simple request for someone who might be good at cryptic analysis. I might be way off base here. It’s just that this seems to answer the question about the value of the journals to all of us. To the family, they would be invaluable but to us, looking for anything about the Roswell case, they might just be another dead end.