Roswell Solved: I Think Not

 

A little more than thirty years ago, a conflict erupted in the Roswell case when it was discovered that in a picture of Brigadier General Roger Ramey, portions of a document he held could be read. Anyone with an engagement of the picture and a magnifying glass could see that it mentioned Fort Worth, Texas and weather balloons. There was one interesting word that most researchers agreed on and that was disk. Given that the date of the photograph was established as July 8, 1947, and that it was Ramey who held it, the obvious conclusion was that the document related in some fashion to the Roswell UFO crash.

BG Roger Ramey and COL Thomas Dubose with
the rawin target. Photograph taken on July 8, 1947.

Everyone agrees that something fell near Corona, New Mexico, sometime in early July 1947, and everyone agrees that Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., of the 509^th Bomb Group, stationed at the Roswell Army Air Field, along with Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, had traveled to the site of the wreck. They recovered debris which they transported to the air field either late on July 7 or early on July 8. At this point, the consensus deviates dramatically. One is the theory of an alien off-world spacecraft and at the opposite end is weather balloons with rawin radar reflectors.

Attempts to read the entire document held by General Ramey, who commanded the Eighth Air Force, were sparked by the theory that this document, with an undisputed provenance relates to the Roswell crash case. The negative for the picture is held in the Special Collections Library at the University of Texas at Arlington. The photograph, taken by J. Bond Johnson, was donated to the library, along with thousands of others taken by Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporters and photographers over the decades.

Entrance to the Special Collections at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

There are those who dismiss the importance of this photograph and the information contained on what is called the Ramey Memo because, what “crashed” near Corona, New Mexico in early July 1947 was nothing more than weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors which were part of the top-secret Project Mogul. The nature of the project was the reason for the secrecy and the cover story that was handed to the press.

The trouble with this scenario is that the balloon launches in New Mexico were part of an attempt to create a constant level balloon, meaning an array of balloons that would remain at a constant altitude for a long time. The project was using off the shelf weather balloons and rawin radar targets. Nothing in New Mexico was classified and a report of those experiments, along with several photographs, was published in newspapers around the country on July 10, 1947.

One of the many newspapers reporting on Project Mogul, showing that it
wasn't the great secret as claimed. Charles Moore told me that he bought
the ladder shown in the center picture, tying this to Mogul.

One of the project engineers in New Mexico, Charles Moore, told me that the June 4, 1947 launch, which is the culprit in the case, contained no rawin targets which argues against the authenticity of the debris displayed and photographed in General Ramey’s office on July 8.

Well, to be perfectly accurate, what he told me was that Flight No. 4 was configured just like that of Flight No. 5. Flight No. 5, according to the documentation, contained no rawin targets. The question then becomes, if Flight No. 4 had no rawin targets, where did the rawin target photographed in Ramey’s office originate?

Flight No. 5, which, according to the documentation was the first successful flight in New Mexico, raises an additional question. Since there was no data captured by Flight No. 4, and that, according Dr. Albert Crary’s field diary and field notes, was cancelled, the next question is where did the debris found by Mack Brazel originate. It certainly wasn’t part of Project Mogul.

Both Jesse Marcel, Sr. and Thomas Dubose, who appear in other photographs taken in Ramey’s office at time, when shown those pictures said that it wasn’t what had been brought from Roswell. Johnny Mann, a reporter for WWL-TV in New Orleans, accompanied Marcel to Roswell for an interview conducted in the early 1980s. Mann showed Marcel one of the pictures of the debris taken in Ramey’s office. Marcel told Mann that the debris displayed there was not what he had found on the Brazel (Foster) ranch. And Mann told me that during an interview at his home in Amarillo, Texas, in the mid-1990s.

Jesse Marcel, Sr. holding part of a rawin target. He 
would tell reporter Johnny Mann that this was
not the material he had brought from Roswell

Thomas Dubose was interviewed in his home by Don Schmitt and Stan Friedman in the early 1990s. Dubose was quite clear that the material photographed was not samples of the debris recovered on the Brazel ranch. According to Dubose, the debris had been switched.

If the debris in Ramey’s office was not what had been found in New Mexico, then what relevance does studying that debris have? Since it was not what was found, it has no importance in learning about the Roswell crash.

Where does that leave us? Flight No. 4 was cancelled, according to Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes, and if it was cancelled, then it couldn’t have left the debris found by Mack Brazel. As noted, Charles Moore told me that Flight No. 4 was configured in the same way as Flight No. 5, which contained no rawin targets. That means that even if we concede that Flight No. 4 was launched, it had no rawin targets and therefore couldn’t have scattered the metallic debris in the field.

Official records showing nothing for Flight No. 4. Moore claimed
that it performed as well as Flight No. 5.

There is one other minor point often overlooked in this discussion. The records suggest the proposed launch of Flight No. 4 was June 4, 1947. That means it laid in that field for nearly a month before it was discovered by Mack Brazel. Bill Brazel told Don Schmitt and me, repeatedly, that his father was in that particular field nearly every day. Brazel reported the debris only a day or two after he found it. If that is true, and there is no evidence to contradict Bill Brazel’s claim, then what was found was not the remnants of Flight No. 4.

All of this means is that no matter what interpretation is put on an examination of the photographs taken in Ramey’s office, they prove nothing about what fell. That debris is a substitution for the real debris. Any conclusions drawn from those photographs, as related to the debris, are moot. They mean nothing to understanding the overall case.  

That takes us back to the document held by General Ramey. That photograph becomes important to the Roswell case because, if we can read the text, we might learn something of relevance. But the latest interpretation has little to nothing to do with what was photographed. We are directed to a picture of Jesse Marcel, Sr., crouched by the debris, holding a piece of it. Sticking out to the left is a small stick, that appeared to have had part of the foil material from the rawin target attached to it.

In enlargements of that picture, and now in a colorized version of it, there appeared to be some markings on the stick. According to one interpretation, these markings resemble the embossed lettering that Jesse Marcel, Jr., said that he had seen on what he called an I-beam. If true, them this takes us right back to rawin targets and the June 4, 1947 balloon launch.

Colorized version of the photograph that shows
the blobs of glue on the support under
Marcel's right hand.

This claim was examined thirty years ago when the controversy first erupted. Those same blobs were suggested as what Jesse Marcel, Jr. had mistaken for specific alien symbols that might represent off-world writing. Marcel himself said that those blobs didn’t look like anything he had seen on the remains of the debris.

The circumstances suggest that those blobs were nothing more than the residue of the glue to attach the foil to the support structures of the rawin target.

What we have here, is evidence that Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, was cancelled. Charles Moore contradicts this documentation by claiming that Flight No. 4 was launched in the dark, in cloudy weather in violation of the regulations under which they operated. He said that the launch was at 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. in contradiction with Albert Crary’s field notes which indicated the flight had been cancelled at dawn because of clouds. Dawn was two and half to three hours after that alleged launch.

Moore claims that Brazel had found the remains of the June 4 balloon array nearly a month later. Remember, Bill Brazel said that an important water station for the livestock was in the field so that his father would have been there every other day and in some cases every day. Mack Brazel complained to family and friends about the big mess and wondered who was going to clean it up.

Tommy Tyree, who was a sometimes ranch hand helping Brazel, told Don Schmitt and me that the sheep refused to cross the field that was densely packed by the debris. Brazel had to drive them around it. Of course, had it been a Mogul array, Brazel could have picked it up himself in about twenty minutes, especially since the arrays created in New Mexico were two thirds the length of those launched in the East Coast.

All the evidence, when examined dispassionately, tells us that the balloon wreckage in Ramey’s office has little to do with the Roswell case. Clearly, it was meant to cover up a much bigger secret and since the experiments being conducted in New Mexico were not classified, that secret had to be something else.

That leaves us with the Ramey memo and what it might say. That document could be the smoking gun. The problem there is that current technology doesn’t allow us to provide a consensus interpretation of most of the memo. Artificial Intelligence might be able to resolve this problem. But at the moment we haven’t had any luck with AI.