The Roswell Provost Marshal ; Easley vs Darden

For those interested in the minutiae of the Roswell case, there has been a discussion about the roles of the Provost Marshal that involved Major Edwin Easley and Major Robert Darden. Both men served as Provost Marshal at the Roswell Army Air Field. The trouble is who had what authority at what is considered the Impact Site in July 1947, where a major component of the alien craft and the bodies of the flight crew were found.

Although, the documentation that I reviewed, suggested that Easley was the Provost Marshal when Don Schmitt and I interviewed Sheridan Cavitt, he mentioned that Darden was the Provost Marshal. I believe that was the first time that Darden’s name had come up with us. We checked out Darden, and Easley told me that Darden had become the Provost Marshal in 1948. Both men had a connection to that office.

Sheridan Cavitt in 1990. Photo by Kevin Randle

The problem arose in an interview of former Counterintelligence agent, Master Sergeant Lewis “Bill” Rickett conducted by Dr. Mark Rodeghier of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. Although Don Schmitt conducted more interviews with Rickett than any other researcher, Fran Ridge used Rodeghier’s January 1990 interview for the basis of his analysis.

Rickett tells Rodeghier that Cavitt wanted to show him, Rickett, something. They drive about forty-five minutes outside of Roswell which puts them on a site much closer than that near Corona where the debris field was located. Ridge wrote:

Rickett and Cavett arrive near the final impact site and are a short distance down a hill not far from all the activity. There are four or five military vehicles, up about a half a mile or so down the road.

Rickett: What's going on up there?

Cavett [sic] is silent for a while, staring ahead as he drives onward.

Rickett: I don't recognize this place.

Cavett: You'll see. And Darden's even got some of HIS men up there.

Rickett realizes something important is going on. Major Robert Darden is allegedly Chief of Security [assigned to the 390^th Air Service Squadron according to some]. So, they drive up to the first checkpoint, which is Maj. Edwin Easley's MPs. The guards look at them and one of them confronts Rickett. 

Don Schmitt (right) and me (left) on the Impact Site in 2023.

There is the point where the Rodeghier interview becomes interesting. According to Rickett, they had reached the crash site, though he doesn’t know that yet. Ridge wrote:

Rickett: This is kind of hard to believe. It looks to me like something landed here. But if it landed here, I don't see any tracks. I don't know how anything could land here and not leave tracks. The sun is pretty bright. Have you been over there? Don't you see what I see? Looks like there's..............I guess that's metal.

Rickett at that time was approximately fifteen to twenty feet from various closer pieces [of debris].

Rickett: Is it hot? (radioactive) Can you touch it?

Darden is shaking his head no to the first question:

Darden: Yeah, be my guest. That's what I wanted you to ask me. As for the strange wreckage, it was very similar to that found by Marcel and Cavett on the Foster ranch; thin, light, and strong.

Rickett picks up a piece of it, a slightly curved piece of metal, real light. It is about six inches by twelve or fourteen inches. Very light. Rickett crouches down and tries to bend it.

Cavett looks over at Darden and laughs.

Cavett: Smart guy. He's trying to do what WE couldn't do.

In Witness to Roswell Tom Carey and Don Schmitt report, based on Schmitt’s interviews with Rickett, “Rickett picked up a piece of it [metallic debris], about 4 inches by 10 inches, placed it over his knee, and tried to bend it. He couldn’t. Cavitt and Easley laughed at him because they had tried and failed at it too. Rickett had never seen a piece of metal that thin that could not be bent. “The more I looked at it, I couldn’t image what it was.”

Here’s where we run into trouble. In July 1947, Easley was the base Provost Marshal. He was responsible for law enforcement and base security. His subordinate, Captain Beverly Tripp was the commanding officer of the 1395^th MP Company. The 390^th Air Service Squadron, whose area or responsibility included the Silverplate B-29s, which had been modified to carry the atom bomb. Those working on the Silverplate required a higher clearance because of that.

In July 1947, the commanding officer of the 390^th was Lieutenant Colonel Walter Y. Lucas. In July 1947, Darden worked as an air inspector, which takes him out of the picture.

We can confirm this by looking at the telephone numbers in the base telephone directory. In July 1947, Darden’s number was 311 and that number was also found under the Air Inspectors section, with 311 assigned to the administrative office. There is nothing there to hint at an association with the 390^th ASS.

We can follow this train of thought, that is what the telephone numbers can tell us about the assignments of the men in July 1947. We can track who worked where because of the phone numbers listed and the buildings to which those numbers were assigned telling us where they were. All the numbers assigned to the Provost Marshal’s office are in building 418, the Intelligence Office is Building 31 and the Air Service Squadron is in building 670. Darden was in building 81, which is separated from those with security and intelligence.

I also found an interesting reference to the mission of the 390^th in the August 1947 Unit History. It said:

The 390^th Air Service Squadron has been divided the personnel section into three sub-sections to wit: Payroll and Service Records Section, Classification Section and Personal Affairs Section. Emphasis has been placed on a cross-training program so that at least two clerks are qualified to handle each job.

There is nothing to suggest that Darden had any role in July 1947 that would have put him in charge of security on the impact site. That sort of security would have fallen to the Provost Marshal and the MP company. While Rickett did mention Darden in a specific role in 1947, it seems that Rickett remembered Darden as a Provost Marshal but, as noted, Darden didn’t have that job until 1948.

Ridge relied almost solely on Rodeghier’s interview. But Rodeghier had a comment that is relevant to the discussion here. Rodeghier, in an email to Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and me on December 17, 2025, wrote, “In my interview, I let Rickett speak and didn’t correct him because I wanted to get his story as he would tell it. Given what I knew at the time I figured that he was wrong about Easley, but I wanted him to speak freely.”

I’ll note here, that when Don and I spoke to Sheridan Cavitt in Arizona, he was quick to ask if we had spoken to the Provost Marshal. He said that the man’s name was Darden. I believe he was attempting to point us in the wrong direction. I learned that Darden had been the Provost Marshal in Roswell but not in July 1947.

Ridge has, I believe, interpreted points where Rickett mentioned the Provost Marshal that meant it was Darden. It’s a case of a flawed memory. I know how that happens. I used to say that I left my Thanksgiving meal on the serving tray in the mess hall (or Dining Facility in today’s parlance) because, in 1968, the flight had been scrambled on a mission. But two or three years ago, as I was reading the letters I had sent home from Vietnam, I discovered, we hadn’t been anywhere near our mess hall because we had staged near Tay Ninh to assist in a prisoner’s exchange. We were there in case something had gone wrong. I noted that we were provided with a promised meal while there and was outraged that we had to pay for it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, we had been scrambled out of the mess hall on several other occasions and my clearest memory was leaving a tray in the serving line. It just didn’t happen on Thanksgiving. The point is, Darden was the Provost Marshal at the base, just not in July 1947. When Ridge writes, “Major Robert Darden is Chief of Security,” he is wrong about this. Darden probably wasn’t even on the Impact Site. He was, as noted above, assigned in July 1947 to Administration as an air inspector and was in a building away from the Provost Marshal, and the 309^th. I find no connection to a law enforcement, intelligence function, or anything to indicated he was the Chief of Security in 1947. I did find that the Troop Information and Education Officer, the Recruiting Office, and the Ground Safety and Engineering Officer were in building 81.

I found a map of the base. It provides an overview of how the various operations and functions on the base were grouped. It is not the best map but you can access that map here:

https://dn721606.ca.archive.org/0/items/dr_walker-air-force-base--roswell-new-mexico--preliminary-master-plan-maste-13219233/13219233.jpg

Map of the Roswell Army Air Field (Walker Air Force Base. It is not the best example

This doesn’t mean we can reject all that Rickett said. The essence the interview is accurate, it’s just that he got one of the names wrong. This is what happens when a theory is built on a single bit of evidence when other bits are out there but ignored. We must review all the evidence to determine how it all fits together. In this case, Rickett does mention Darden as the Provost Marshal, which is correct information, it’s just he wasn’t the Provost Marshal in 1947. Other testimony and documentation proved this.

Official UFO Rides Again

 

Back in the mid-1970s, there were a half dozen magazines devoted to UFOs and at their peak some had a publishing schedule of nine times a year, and others, six times but that was eventually reduced to quarterly. If you had contacts in the UFO community and could put a complete sentence together, you could supplement your income by writing for them. That many magazines publishing that frequently required a great deal of material.

I started writing my first UFO related article while still in the Army. It had to do with physical evidence. What I didn’t know was that several men’s magazines, those that told stories of interest to men but not those that featured scantily clad women, were developing these UFO magazines. I hit the trend at the right time. I sent off that article, was discharged from the Army and headed to college. Turned out that I was making enough money to pay my tuition and supplement the GI bill which picked up other expenses by writing about UFOs.

I bring all this up now because Bernie O’Connor, who was the original editor for Official UFO, has put together a book, The Official History of Official UFO Magazine, that draws from the first six issues of the magazine. Not only do you get to read the best of those stories, but there is commentary and inside information spread through the book. It’s printed on high quality paper and filled with color photographs and even some of the ads there were published in the magazine in the mid-1970s.

Yes, several of my stories are included in the book. Most people don’t know that I sometimes used the pen name James Butler Bonham, which was the name of one of the defenders of the Alamo. Anyway, some of my earlier writings appeared in the magazine.

At the time, I was also writing science fiction of Robert Charles Cornett, know as RC squared and I’ll let you figure that out. We developed a good relationship with Bernie O’Connor. Once Bob got a check for a dollar more than the agreed-on fee. That extra dollar was for Bob to buy a beer.

When Bernie was the editor, he looked for articles that reflected the reality of the situation rather than sensational stories that might pull in the fringe readers. Later, as Bernie explains in the book, the owner wanted to exploit fictional events because they sold magazines. As Bernie put it in one of the commentaries included, it proved the skeptical theory that we all were only in it for the money. While that wasn’t true for Bernie or those of us who wrote for the magazine, turned out the owner was just in it for the money. As I say, this is one of those side commentaries that provides insight to times.

Bernie O'Connor

The magazine appealed to those of us with an interest in UFOs, but didn’t cater to one point of view. If the writer, who was often an investigator who got out and talked to the witnesses, could provide the source and documentation, then Bernie was interested in it. That doesn’t mean that the skeptics were left out. Included is an article by James Oberg who interviewed Philip Klass about the Walton abduction. Both Oberg and Klass are or were hardcore skeptics. And there was another story written by George Earley about why Klass didn’t believe in UFOs.

There were also articles covering the history of UFO investigation, such as articles on “The History of APRO” by Dick Ruhl, “The Center for UFO Studies” by Don Berliner, and “UFOs and the CIA” by Jim and Coral Lorenzen. There were also articles such as “UFOs Behind the Iron Curtain” by Dr. Felix Y Zigel and Joseph Brill. And I haven’t even mentioned Dick Hall’s “The CIA Robertson Panel Report Declassified.”

That’s just a quick sample of some of the early research written by those who would become well known in the UFO field. The book is a history of what was of interest in the mid-1970s, along with was happening in the world outside the walls the magazine offices.

I must admit that it is somewhat pricey, but if you have an interest in the world of the UFO as it existed in the mid-1970s, this is a must have. You get a good feel about who was doing what and what was happening at the time. It ranks up there with Jerome Clark’s massive The UFO Encyclopedia and the work of Michael Swords and Robert Powell in there UFOs and the Government. If you are serious about UFOs, then this is a must have in your library.

Ray Stanford's Socorro Photograph

For those interested in such things, Ray Stanford had claimed that he had a photograph of a Socorro-like UFO, he had taken after the Lonnie Zamora sighting. He was careful who saw the picture. I’m not sure his rationale for that, but there were very few who had seen it. We had to rely on their descriptions of the picture, if they were inclined to give us any information about it.

Ben Moss, who had worked with Stanford for years, thought the picture to be important. He had mentioned to me that it looked somewhat like an egg-shaped UFO with landing gear underneath it. With Stanford’s passing, and with Stanford’s wife’s permission, Ben searched through the mountains of material that Stanford had collected. He didn’t want to say anything about this, though he had located a print. He wanted to have the negative.

From what he emailed me, he thought he had the original negative, but, apparently, it was only a duplicate. It follows here:

The Ray Stanford photo of the Socorro like-object.

Close up of the object, whatever it might be.

Here is the important part of Ben’s email to me. “If you wanted to post the Socorro craft pictures I sent, please feel free to do so with any commentary you want to add, I'm sure the usual suspects will be commenting on them. I discovered that the picture of the dynamite shack that I thought had the images was the wrong one, it is in the original polaroid Ray took without the kid standing in front of it. I will scan that picture in January, but have no negative, yet I did find it at Ray’s house listed as 'original', and as I examined it there are several objects in the background sky, I just need to get a high DPI scan to confirm.”

Here’s where we are with this. A solid analysis has not been made but Ben plans to do that. We have an interesting story that connects to the Zamora sighting, we have photographic evidence, but those of us who have been around for a while, we know we need the original. Ben is attempting to find that doing the follow up investigation as time permits.

Without the original, and without a solid analysis, I can say nothing about the authenticity of the photograph. All I’m able to say is that we now know what it looks like. We need the analysis to determine the important of the picture. 

Robert Willingham and the Lie about the Del Rio UFO Crash

 

A couple of years ago, I heard Dr. Eric Davis mention, briefly, that the UFO crash near Del Rio, Texas, was real. It was something of a “throw away” line on Coast-to-Coast AM, and there was no follow up. Having investigated the Del Rio crash for more than two decades, I was surprised by such a bold statement and attempted to reach out to Dr. Davis to learn why he thought the case was solid.

I never received a reply… until now.

Apparently, André Skondras reached out to Dr. Davis to ask him about my assessment of the Del Rio case. According to Andre the response was, “Davis maintains that Randle’s conclusions about crash-retrieval history are incorrect and based on flawed research. He stresses that he, David Grusch, and other cleared personnel were briefed on classified evidence firsthand—information that remains inaccessible to the public due to long-standing national-security restrictions. According to Davis, critics often misunderstand how these secrecy protocols work, and the absence of public proof does not invalidate what is known inside classified programs.”

Yes, we have the old dodge that he is privy to information from classified sources and that he, among others, were briefed on classified evidence and that we, on the outside, misunderstand secrecy protocols. Except, of course, I served as an intelligence officer in both the Air Force and later the Army. I get all that, but the problem is his belief that the Del Rio crash is real.

As I have noted in the past, when the story first popped up, in 1968, the architect of the tale was Robert Willingham, identified as a lieutenant colonel in the Civil Air Patrol. You can read the entry from Skylook, the original publication of MUFON here:

The Willingham story is the 3rd paragraph down. 

This provides not only the article but identifies the 

source.

I will point out that the original source on this, the self-proclaimed Air Force colonel, Robert Willingham lied about his Air Force experiences, lied about being a fighter pilot and lied about serving in Korea. I’ll note that he eventually claimed to have been present at six other crashes. I was the first to actually vet his military record and found it wanting. I learned he had been a Civil Air Patrol lieutenant colonel, which is nowhere the same as being an Air Force officer. For those who missed it, a good recap of all this information can be found here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/09/dr-davis-confirms-del-rio-ufo-crash.html

The point is that in over two decades of research into the Del Rio crash, I have not found another witness to the Del Rio retrieval. The date has changed three times and Willingham told me that he wasn’t sure if it was 1954 or 1955. Please note here that I did interview the prime source and so far, as I know, the only witness to the crash.

While Dr. Davis may well have been exposed to first-hand witnesses to other crash/retrievals, he heard nothing first-hand about Del Rio. That crash was invented by Robert Willingham. Other than him, there is no evidence that the crash took place.

I’ll close this by saying that unless there is something about Del Rio that I haven’t discovered, and I freely admit that possibility, my conclusion, based on my research to date is that it is a hoax.

The Project Mogul Conspiracy Destroyed by One Question... Well, Two

 

Here’s another conspiracy that can be destroyed by a single question. This conspiracy has been pushed by most in the media, by the military and the skeptics who are supposed to question everything but only that which suggests alien visitation.

“How can balloon Flight #4, which was cancelled, leave any sort of debris on the ranch managed by Mack Brazel?”

As I wrote that, I thought of another question. “How can a flight that was cancelled at dawn according to the documentation, actually been launched two or three hours earlier?”

Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the New York University balloon project based in Alamogordo, kept comprehensive notes on the balloon flights. The first of those flights, which some have labeled as Project Mogul, was supposed to be Flight #4, but according to Crary’s field notes and diary entries, was cancelled at dawn because of clouds.

Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the
balloon flights in New Mexico.

The rules under which they operated in New Mexico prohibited flights at night or in cloudy weather. The balloon arrays, which could reach 600 feet in length were a hazard to aerial navigation and would be invisible to air commerce at night or in cloudy weather. As dawn on June 4, 1947 broke, it was cloudy and the flight was cancelled. The next day, Flight #5 was launched and according to Crary’s records, was the first successful flight in New Mexico.

Yes, I know that Crary’s notes also mentioned a cluster of balloons that were flown on June 4 later in the day. But according to the records and reports, this was nothing like the full array. It was small, was not expected to leave the White Sands Missile Range and was not a hazard to aerial navigation. The winds aloft data suggested that it would not have flown anywhere near the ranch Brazel managed.

How do I know?

Charles Moore, an engine with the project in New Mexico and who provided the analysis of the winds aloft data told us that. Oh, not directly, but in his excuses for Flight #4.

Moore told us, and wrote, that his examination of the winds aloft data, including the records that I gave him, took the balloons in a different direction if they had been launched at dawn. The winds aloft data I received from the National Weather Service was good only to 20,000 feet and was sometimes incomplete. Moore found records from a station in Orogrande, New Mexico (on the highway between Alamogordo and El Paso), that had records that went up to 50,000 feet. According to those records and those I supplied, a front went through the area around Alamogordo about dawn. It changed the atmospheric dynamics which met that the balloon would not have flown to the northeast to fall on the Brazel ranch. Well, that’s not quite true. Moore said that his calculations put the balloon about 17 miles south of the ranch. Still close enough to suggest a legitimate culprit, if those calculations were accurate.

Charles Moore reviewing the winds aloft data that I
supplied to him.
Photo by Kevin Randle

However, that front that passed through the Alamogordo area, meant the balloons wouldn’t even have come that close to the ranch. However, if the balloons were launched early in the morning, at 2:30 or 3:30, the winds would have driven the balloons in the right direction. The solution, well, the balloons were launched before dawn, in violation of the regulations.

There is nothing in Crary’s documents to suggest that happened and you have to wonder how a balloon array launched hours earlier could be cancelled at dawn. This little problem is ignored by those who just can’t wrap their heads around the fact that Flight #4 never flew. And if it never flew, it left no wreckage on the ranch.

I could have mentioned that the pasture where the wreckage was found was one Brazel was in, if not every day, then every other day. That means he would have found the debris on June 5 or 6, and since there was quite a bit of it, that wreckage was a hazard to the operation of the ranch. The sheep refused to cross it to get at water. Brazel wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess, which was his motivation for driving into Roswell.

And here’s another little tidbit. Charles Moore told me that Flight #4 had been configured just like Flight #5. Since #4 was cancelled, we don’t have any schematic of it. However, #5, which was described as the first successful flight in New Mexico, contained no rawin targets. That raises the question of where did the metallic debris originate? Where did the rawin target displayed in General Ramey’s office originate? Certainly not with the mythical Flight #4.

The schematic for Flight # 5. 

I could ask additional questions such as if the debris fell on June 4, why did Brazel wait until July 6 to take samples into Roswell? Why couldn’t the officers of the 509^th Bomb Group recognize the debris taken to the sheriff? Why did they arrange a special flight to Fort Worth Army Air Field and then send that material onto Washington, D.C.?

The point here, is that there is no current terrestrial explanation for what Brazel found and the soldiers in the 509^th recovered in that field. I am astonished that the news media insists on telling us that a Project Mogul balloon was responsible for the debris, yet all the documentation tells us otherwise. We can point to the pictures taken in Fort Worth of a weather balloon and rawin radar target in General Ramey’s off and ask where that material originated. Two of the officers in those pictures, Colonel Thomas DuBose, then the chief of staff at the Eighth Air Force Headquarters and Major Jesse Marcel, Sr. said that what was photographed was NOT the material recovered in New Mexico.

Jesse Marcel with the fake debris in
General Ramey's office.

I’ll let this go here. There are several other points that rule out Flight #4 but I believe the case is made. There was no Flight #4, and without it, the last of the terrestrial explanations is eliminated. You decide for yourselves what the answer to that question is.

Coast-to-Coast AM Sightings for December 5, 2025

 

While there have been many discussions about the Age of Disclosure, which opened to somewhat mixed reviews, not much has happened in the hunt for Disclosure. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been other sightings that are of interest. I made a survey of cases on the National UFO Reporting Center website, and here are a couple of the more interesting sightings.

I noticed an uptick in triangular objects and while this one was in sight for only a few seconds, there is a photograph of it. The witnesses, three of them, were near New Bern, North Carolina on November 13 of this year. They reported they saw the triangle and that it took off in a matter of two or three seconds. They said that there were lights on the craft, and the photograph does show a triangular formation of lights. You see the photograph here:

The New Bern Triangle.

You can also access the case at:

https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=194088

The other aspect of the case, which is somewhat problematic is that they reported a possible abduction. There are no details about that and I’ll try to follow up on it.

On October 31 of this year, a pair of witnesses in Prospect, CT, said they were on the deck in the backyard. The first witness said she saw something glowing in the dark woods behind her parent’s house.

She wondered, “Is that someone up there having a fire? However, it was 1:09 am and it didn't look like a fire. We then noticed it started to move. With our naked eye it looked as if it was flickering, it went from a cluster of lights into a straight line and then we saw it disperse into 4-5 separate orbs/balls of light in opposite directions and then it was completely gone. It only lasted about 4 mins total. There was no sound. I was very scared at what we witnessed.”

There is a short video on the National UFO Reporting Center website that is interesting. The lights didn’t look like those on an aircraft and the motion of the object might be more the result of the witness moving the camera rather than motion of the craft.

She said that the lights were white, purple and green on the object and it moved slowly until it dispersed into orbs. The lights were about fifty yards away. The other interesting aspect of the case was that she reported that the animals reacted to the lights suggesting an electromagnetic component to the report. You can see the video here:

https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=193777

And finally, again proving the international aspect to the phenomenon, the two observers in Edmonton, Canada, watched a flat black triangle and an Arrowhead shaped craft for about a minute on October 26 of this year.

The witness said that as he was stargazing when he spotted a dark, slow-moving triangle. He said there were no lights, no reflection, and it was at about 2000 feet. They heard no sound, but it did have aura around it that made him think it was hot. He thought it was about the size of two 747s stacked up.

About two minutes later as he stood in his driveway, he said that he looked up hoping to see something else. He said this was a different craft but flying along the same flight path as the first UFO. Rather than the flat black of the first craft, this one seemed to be silver and had five or six lights on the underside.

He said, “As it drifted past the lights became hard to see as they must have been recessed in the hull. I think this one was about 3000 feet up, it was more directly above me.”

He said that he thought the craft were about 300 feet long and moving about 300 miles an hour. I’ll note that it is very difficult to accurately estimate distance, speed and size at night without the sort of references found during the day.

You can see the illustrations of the UFOs on the NUFORC website. Click on the Tier 1 reports and scroll down to the Edmonton case.

Why the Roswell Press Release

 

I’m going to have to stop looking at the Internet because there is always something there that pisses me off. The latest was a video about five conspiracies that can be destroyed by asking a single question. Naturally, I clicked on it because I was sure that Roswell would show up. It was the fourth of five. I was surprised by the question that supposedly unravels the Roswell conspiracy.

That question was, “Why did the 509^th Bomb Group issue the press release saying that they had captured a flying saucer in the Roswell region?”

It is fine question but one that I have answered several times. The answer is predicated on the timing of the question, meaning that the press release was issued on July 8, 1947, only two weeks after the phenomenon had exploded in the newspapers. Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine strange craft flying in formation was the cause of the interest and the inspiration for the term flying saucer. In those days that followed, there were hundreds of reports of flying saucers. There were almost as many explanations for what they were as there were newspapers and military theories. The idea of an interplanetary craft was one of those but that explanation was not at the top of the list.

Ed Ruppelt, who took over as the chief of Project Grudge which evolved into Project Blue Book said that the Pentagon was in a panic over the reports. There was a certain hysteria about the flying saucers. It was because no one knew what was going on. Army Air Forces fighters had intercepted UFOs, and the UFOs had paced commercial aircraft, not to mention cars on the ground. Part of the hysteria was fed by those inventing their tales of close encounters suggesting an alien invasion. No one knew what was going on.

When Jess Marcel, Sr. returned to the Roswell Army Air Field with a carload of strange metallic debris, no one knew what it was. According to the officers I interviewed who were there at the time and would have been in a position to know what was going on, were aware of the hysteria. After all, World War II had been over for less than two years, the Soviets were throwing up an Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe that suggested that a new war was on the horizon and now there were tales of strange craft flying around the US unimpeded.  

Randle on the Debris Field in the early 1990s.

The debris recovered by Marcel suggested that the flying saucers might not be hostile or threatening. Blanchard’s thoughts were to announce they had a flying saucer, though it was only bits and pieces of one, but it was enough that they could relieve some of that hysteria. His thoughts were to remove that one aspect from the public consciousness. According to the officers I talked to, including Walter Haut, Colonel Butch Blanchard felt an obligation to report what they had found.

Walter Haut, the man who wrote the press release at his home in Roswell.
Photo by Kevin randle

It was only after the debris had been examined carefully that they realized that whatever it was, it represented a technology that surpassed that of the United States. The metal that was extremely light weight but super strong, what we now suspect was fiber optics which had yet to be invented and, of course, the thin metal that when wadded up returned to its original shape.

But the real turning point came after the press release was, well, released. That was when the rest of the craft was discovered much closer to Roswell than the debris field 65 miles away near Corona. It was here that the bodies were recovered. That changed the dynamic. That told those in charge, meaning the civilian and military leadership in Washington that what was recovered was something so extraordinary that they created the cover up to give them time to determine just what was going on. Were the flying saucers hostile? Benign? What would it mean to our civilization?

The events in Roswell were isolated because Roswell was in the middle of the desert and the military could control all the information coming out of the town. They shifted the story to Fort Worth and Brigadier General Roger Ramey. He was able to put out the fire with the display of a weather balloon and a rawin target. The tale died at that point and the press moved onto other stories.

But the answer to the question about the press release is simple. When Blanchard ordered the press release, all they had was the strange metallic debris, which was just strange metallic debris. He thought to end some of the hysteria by telling the public that they had found a flying saucer. It was nothing to worry about. Blanchard, as the commanding officer at the Roswell Army Air Field, had the authority to provide the press with information that he believed was important. He had not seen the true value of the find until the craft and bodies were located but believed it was his duty to suggest that they had the situation under control. They had a flying saucer and it was nothing to worry about.

The trouble was, he issued the press release prematurely. Had he waited twenty-four hours, it is unlikely we would have ever heard about the crash. It was a tactical mistake but not a strategic one. The situation was altered within three hours of the press release hitting the national wires. But the point here is that I know why he issued the press release based on my discussions with some of the senior officers on the base in 1947. Forty-five years after the event, they provided an answer, but the skeptical community is now hung up on Project Mogul, just one more evidence of how important the find was.

Now, can we put that question into a footnote where it belongs and get onto the more important aspects of the case?

John Greenewald, Christopher Mellon and Kingman

As those of you who visit here regularly know, I believe the tale of a UFO crash near Kingman, Arizona in 1953, is a fake. It boiled down to a single identified eyewitness, who said that he embellished his stories when he had been drinking. It seems to be a tale that an adult fed to two teenagers, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. I would guess that he thought the story would go no farther than the two young men. The trouble is that Arthur Stansel’s story spread into the public arena and Ray Fowler got involved. He wrote an article for Official UFO’s April 1976 issue. Kingman entered the big time.

I’m not going to recap all that now. I’ve written extensively about it and included a long chapter about it in my upcoming book on UFOs. In the book, there are details that suggest a hoax. But then, Christopher Mellon released screen shots of an email in which Kingman is mentioned. I have thought that Mellon was one of the correspondents but it turns out that he had received a copy of the email from someone else, a person he refused to identify.

My point has always been that if Mellon was on the inside, as he had suggested in the past, he should have known the truth about Kingman. He would have known about the newspaper articles from the 1950s found by David Rudiak that mention all sorts of strange things going on in that Arizona but all of which seem to be more fantasy than fact. My thought has been that anyone who had access to government files would know the truth. This was developing into another MJ-12 fiasco.

David Rudiak at the Roswell Festival.
Photo by Kevin Randle

By that I mean the release of the MJ-12 documents sparked a government and Air Force investigation of the MJ-12 documents. Their conclusion was that the documents were bogus. I had thought them authentic when first published, but my investigation, based in part on my experience as an Air Force Intelligence Officer, suggested a hoax. I detailed all that in the updated version of my book, Case MJ-12.

I mention all this because John Greenewald just published on his The Black Vault website, the results of his FOIA requests for more information about this.

You can access the whole article at:

https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/inside-the-pentagons-review-of-christopher-mellons-alleged-ufo-crash-retrieval-text/

 What I learn from that is that Mellon was able to publish the redacted email because it wasn’t classified. John wrote:

The FOIA file begins with Mellon’s January 19, 2024, email to DOPSR, in which he submitted the text message screenshot he later published publicly. Mellon wrote that he was seeking confirmation “to confirm it is not classified,” and noted that a submission mailed earlier had been returned “because some employee deemed it a security threat.”

The email does suggest there might be a classified portion because the email said, “We also know that a still highly classified memo by a Secretary of the USAF in the 1950s is still in effect to maintain the cover of UAPs.”

John Greenewald in Denver.
Photo by Kevin Randle

I will note here, that I am bothered by the use of the term UAP. That is fairly new term and Mellon, in his attempt to learn if there was anything classified in the email, wrote:

In that letter, Mellon explained that the message was sent to him “some years ago” by a former DoD employee alleging they were “being read into a program involving the exploitation of recovered off-world technology”. Mellon also indicated he had “redacted the name of the alleged ‘gatekeeper’” and emphasized that he respected the confidentiality of the source.

Of course, without knowing when the email was sent and the only date on the document was when it was cleared for publication, we might be dealing with an anachronism. We just don’t know what “some years ago” means in terms of when Mellon received it. There is a suggestion that the email was from 2020, which is after the term UAP was invented, but that is just a guess.

In his posting to his website, John provided additional detail that I believe weakens this alleged “leak.” He wrote:

The approval stamp, dated March 1, 2024, appears on the version later published by Mellon in April 2024, when Mellon published the message and an accompanying explanation. In it, he emphasized that he received the text years earlier from “a senior government official” who he said “had plausible access and was high-ranking,” and whose claim of access to a crash retrieval program was why he believed at least some allegations merited attention.

He also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.

So, what do we have here? We have an email from an unidentified source referencing a case that is a hoax but suggests it is real. We learn there is a highly classified program, but we don’t have the name of that program. And we have the suggestion that the writer was denied access to the program and saw nothing himself. We have no way to vet the information in the email, which makes it virtually useless.

As for the idea that there might be something to the email, John quoted “The records also reveal that Mellon’s first attempt to submit the material was returned to him after a DOPSR employee deemed his three-page mailed package a ‘security threat’ a detail he did not disclose in his public article.” I would suggest that whoever initially received the request noted the reference to that highly-classified program. That would have been enough for him or her to flag it for further review.

I believe the most telling of the sentences in the letter is one that bears repeating. It said, “He also acknowledged that the sender later told him they were denied access to the alleged program and had not seen any recovered craft.”

In the end, this becomes another rabbit hole that leads us to a dead end. Unless we are given some way to vet the information in that email it is just rumor. I say that someone used the Kingman case because he or she thought it was a real event. In the end, you might say that was the poison pill.

I do applaud John for providing us with additional information about this aspect of the Kingman case. It just doesn’t take us anywhere we haven’t been before.

 

For those who wish to follow up on all this and who might not be completely aware of all the data available, I suggest the following:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Kingman#google_vignette 

John Stossel, Wikipedia and Project Mogul

 While looking for YouTube videos to entertain me as I ate breakfast, I found John Stossel’s analysis of Wikipedia’s bias. He, of course, focused more on the political arena than in that of the paranormal, but that got me thinking, “What is their analysis of the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell UFO crash.”

You can watch the Stossel video that started this whole thing here:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+stossel+wikipedia

The very first thing I noticed in the Wikipedia entry, under a heading of “Roswell Incident,” was the opening sentence. “In 1947, a Project Mogul balloon NYU Flight 4, launched June 4, crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.”

The problem with that sentence is that it ignores the field notes and later diary entries written by Dr. Albert Crary, who as the project leader. Those documents eliminate a balloon launch on June 4. Dr. Crary wrote, “June 4 Wed. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds [emphasis added].” For some reason, those of the skeptical bias seem to ignore that statement, inventing alternative meanings behind it. I believe it is destructive to the Mogul explanation because, there was no launch of a full array on June 4.

Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the
balloon flights in 1947.

In the chart of what was the New York University balloon project launches, we see there was no data collected for Flight #4. In fact, it’s not even listed as a flight because it was canceled. Flight #5, which flew the next day, has the notation “First successful flight carrying a heavy load.”

Charles Moore, one of the engineers on the project, told me, that Flight #4 was as successful as Flight #5. This is an obvious contradiction to the documentation that is available because, if it had collected data, it would be listed.

To be fair, because I think of this as an investigation and not a debate, I note that, according to Crary’s notes, “Flew a regular sono buoy up in a cluster of balloons and had good luck with receiver on the ground but poor on the plane.”

But the next entry, for June 5, clarifies the situation. Crary wrote, “Up at 4 to shoot two charges for balloon flight. Whole assembly of constant altitude balloons set up at 0500.” That suggests that the cluster of balloons was not a full assembly, contrary to Moore’s claim that there was a Flight #4 and it was as successful as Flight #5.

The New York Times endorsed the idea that there was something extremely unusual about the Mogul arrays. According to that story, “"...squadrons of big balloons ... It was like having an elephant in your backyard and hoping that no one would notice it. ... To the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil. ... photographs of it, taken in 1947 and published in newspapers, show bits and pieces of what are obviously collapsed balloons and radar reflectors.”

First, there weren’t squadrons of big balloons but an array of standard weather balloons, recognizable, even when arranged in a long array. There was nothing about the balloons that would render them unrecognizable.

Second, according to what Charles Moore told me, the mythical Flight #4 was configured exactly like Flight #5. The problem then is that the schematic for Flight #5 contains no rawin targets, which The New York Times described as “the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil.”

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I supplied to him.
Photo by Kevin Randle

Third, the photographs published in the newspapers in 1947 do, in fact, show a rawin radar target, but both Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., and Colonel Thomas Dubose, who are in the pictures, have testified that the material in the pictures was not the material recovered in Roswell. Both said that the real material was switched with that of the weather balloon and radar reflector.

Fourth, I don’t know who those untrained eyes belonged to. The balloon and rawin targets were used by the thousands during the invasion of Okinawa for example, and were later used during the Bikini atom tests. The 509^th and Jess Marcel participated in those tests at Bikini. There simply wasn’t anything that unusual about the balloons and radar reflectors which had been launched by the thousands for weather gathering purposes. They were easily recognizable to the officers of the 509^th, because their weather office used them.

Major Jesse Marcel with part of a damaged
radar reflector. Marcel was later quoted as
saying that this wasn't what he had found
in New Mexico.

One of the facts that is never discussed by the skeptical side of the argument is that Mack Brazel, the rancher who took the samples to the Chaves County Sheriff, George Wilcox, knew what weather balloons looked like. Brazel was concerned by the size of the debris field and wanted to know who as going to clear up the mess.

The second problem is that Flight #4 was allegedly launched on June 4, but Brazel didn’t take samples of the debris to the sheriff until a month later. Descriptions of the debris scattered in the pasture suggest that it was so thick that the sheep refused to cross the field for water. According to Bill Brazel, son of Mack, and Tommy Tyree, a sometimes ranch hand, Mack was in the field at least every other day, meaning that he would have found it on June 5 or 6, if we believe the newspapers story. Given the location of the debris and the water source, Brazel would have reported it with in a day or two. He wanted those responsible for scattering the debris to clean it up. This tidbit of information is just another reason to reject the Mogul explanation.

All this is to provide some perspective for my suggestion that Wikipedia’s bias is showing. Every source cited in the footnotes is from a skeptical publication or a writer with a skeptical point of view. Looking at some of the source material used, I can point to repeated errors. Donovan Webster provides us with many examples of this from suggesting the Mac [sic] Brazel was 80 miles from Roswell to reporting, “Seeking answers, he contacted Colonel “Butch” Blanchard, commander of the Roswell Army Airfield’s 509th Composite Group, located just outside of town. Blanchard was stymied. Working his way up the chain of command, he decided to contact his superior, General Roger W. Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas.”

Although it is unclear who the “he” is, the information was relayed to Jesse Marcel and not Colonel William Butch Blanchard. It was Marcel who was stymied and accompanied Brazel back to the ranch with Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Counterintelligence Corps. They traveled out to the ranch. Marcel was not accompanied by Sheriff Wilcox.

Webster also wrote, “On June 21, Navy Seaman Harold Dahl claimed to have seen six unidentified flying objects in the sky near Maury Island in Washington state’s Puget Sound. The next morning, Dahl said he was sought out and debriefed by ‘men in black.’”

I’m not sure why Webster brought this in because it has nothing to do with the Roswell case and it is filled with more inaccuracies than his Roswell information. Harold Dahl was not a Navy seaman but operated a salvage boat. His report was called the dirtiest hoax in UFO history by Captain Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book.

But I digress.

And Webster also wrote, “By early July 1947, Brazel had heard tales of flying saucers in the Pacific Northwest. These sightings spurred him to show his discovery to the authorities, but just one day after the Air Force announced it had come into possession of a flying saucer, Roswell’s morning newspaper debunked the story.”

Except Brazel lived in isolation on the ranch without radio or electricity. He hadn’t heard about the flying saucers and was not “spurred” to show his discovery to authorities by those stories. He was spurred to take samples of the debris to Roswell because he wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess in one of the pastures. His son, Bill Brazel told me that. Brazel’s neighbors and Tommy Tyree also said that.

Bill Brazel (on the left) with Don Schmitt on the debris field near Corona, NM.
Photo by Kevin Randle

The point here is that the story by Webster was not very accurate and I have to wonder why the Smithsonian Magazine, which printed it, didn’t bother to fact check it.

It is also clear that one of Webster’s sources was the July 9, 1947, story in the Roswell Daily Record, “Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He told about it.” I mention this because a big deal is made about rubber sticks, tinfoil and rough paper descriptions that suggest a weather balloon. But according to the newspaper, “Brazel said that he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not resemble either of these.”

Brazel is quoted as saying “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Except, of course, had it been a Mogul balloon, it would have resemble those because that phantom flight was made up of off the shelf weather balloons and although it was claimed that there had been radar targets with it, according to the records and Charles Moore, there had been no radar targets on that flight.

Once again, I’m dragged away from the point and that is the bias of Wikipedia. Other sources include Kendrick Frazier, one of the leaders of a large skeptical society once known as CSICOP but later as CSI; Lieutenant James McAndrew of the Air Force team that investigated Roswell in the mid-1990s; Kathryn S. Olmsted, who reinforces the Air Force position and William J. Broad of The New York Times who has published skeptical articles about UFOs and Roswell on multiple occasions.

I must wonder why there is nothing from any of us who had interviewed the witnesses in Roswell, done the research in various archives and newspaper files, and have a different point of view. James McAndrew called me on several occasions, attempting to get me to tell him that I was only in it for the money. He refused to listen to testimony that I had gathered, listen to the tapes of those interviews with officers like Major Edwin Easley who suggested that following the extraterrestrial was not the wrong path, or those who had seen the bodies.

It is not necessary to believe that what fell at Roswell was an alien craft, but because there is controversy about it and a large body of eyewitness testimony available on both audio and video tape, not to mention documentation that eliminates Project Mogul as the culprit, you would think that the counter arguments would be addressed. I could point to a several errors in the works cited (and to be fair, there are mistakes on the other side as well), but in the interest of accuracy, shouldn’t those arguments be referenced? Doesn’t Wikipedia have an obligation to get it right?

John Stossel was so put off by the bias displayed in Wikipedia’s unreliable sources for political stories, he decided he wasn’t going to donate to them again. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would suggest that Wikipedia provide a comprehensive report on Project Mogul rather than parroting the words of the Air Force on this… And I didn’t even mention the anthropomorphic dummies dropped in the area some ten years after the crash used to explain the descriptions of alien bodies reported in 1947.

In this case, I’m not arguing that the Roswell crash was alien, but that the comprehensive information gathered from those who were on the scene in 1947 were simply ignored. For a detailed analysis of the Mogul explanation, may I suggest Roswell in the 21^st Century. It contains a great deal of information not mentioned here including footnotes on the sources.

(Author’s Note: This was supposed to be much shorter but I wanted to make the point that this particular entry was biased and does not provide an accurate picture of what happened at Roswell.)