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.

TheSneezingMonkey Fails in Debunking Roswell

I am growing very tired of the Internet and the number of people who use it to expose their ignorance. Please note the term ignorance. I am granting them the intelligence to realize their mistakes when speaking about UFOs. When they claim a deep dive, it seems to be into the shallow end of the pool, and I realize my task is greater than I thought.

Let’s talk about TheSneezingMonkey and his latest rant about some things Ufological. It is clear to me, that he just doesn’t bother with the deep dive research he claimed which, in the world today and the Internet, is much simpler than it was even a decade ago. The answers are out there, if you’re smart enough to find them.

Take the analysis by TheSneezingMonkey when he is talking about the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. He grabbed several explanations but he talked about the Flying Wing, suggesting that it might be what Arnold had seen. He did question if there would have been several of them flying in formation.  

He was talking about the YB-35 Flying Wing which did exist at the time. Several of them were being tested at Muroc Army Air Field (later Edwards Air Force Base). What he didn’t find, and what I published more than two decades ago, is that in June 1947, all of them were grounded.

Here’s what I know about that. The YB-35, a full-scale Flying Wing, first flew on June 25, 1946 from Muroc AAF. On September 11, 1946, the YB-35, suffering from gear box and propeller problems was grounded. A full-scale flying program would not resume until February 1948. There were test flights made on June 26, 1947 (two days after the Arnold sighting) but the single aircraft did not leave Southern California. The Flying Wing simply was not available in the numbers or location to be seen by Arnold. It really has no place in this discussion in the world today.

Arnold's original drawing to the Army. It looks nothing like the Flying Wing,
which is probably a better way to eliminated that aircraft as the source

But what really set the tone here was a comment made to the YouTube channel by someone calling himself or herself @RUTHAN667. That comment said, “Rosswell is mostly based on Marcell story and he is proven liar, got his moment of fame, lied to be pilot, lied about that he shoot down 5 planes.. Whole family, started finding diaries and milked story dry.. Later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies.. Brasel imprisonning. Corso cashed on it too.”

Well, it’s not Rosswell but Roswell and it’s not Marcell but Marcel. From there we move into territory that isn’t as black and white as it seems. While I wouldn’t call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar, the problem is that he made some claims that were less than truthful. He didn’t say he was a pilot, but had flown as a pilot while serving in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces during World War II.

True, I’m splitting a fine hair here, and it seems unlikely that an officer who is not rated would accumulate that much flight time. I can envision him getting some stick time but not 3000 hours. I can say that I flew as a door gunner in Vietnam but I was not rated in that position. I was a helicopter pilot and later an aircraft commander and accumulated just under 2000 hours during that portion of my career. I’m willing to give him a pass on that particular claim because of the way things worked in aviation units. Clearly, Marcel did participate in combat missions during his tour in the Pacific and was awarded two air medals for that.

Kevin Randle in Vietnam in 1969

However, as we break this down, Marcel apparently told Bob Pratt that he, Marcel, had five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft. I got Marcel’s records and the Unit Histories from the units in which he served. There is no indication that he shot down any enemy aircraft. The Army Air Forces kept records of the majority of those who downed enemy aircraft and Marcel’s name does not appear on the list. And yes, that list includes the names of the men who shot down enemy aircraft in all theaters of the war, and those flying as gunners but not pilots. The enlisted man with the most recorded kills shot down 19 enemy planes, but he was not a pilot. I believe it was Richard Bong who holds the American record with 40. Pappy Boyington, I believe shot down 28 (though I think he was only credited with 26).

At any rate, Marcel doesn’t get a pass on this. There is simply no evidence to support his claim of five air medals (though I have the citations for the two he did receive).

There are other things that he said that we can’t verify. His testimony is problematic. I will note, however, where we have additional witnesses and documentation, then what he said was probably accurate. He did travel to the Brazel (Foster) ranch and he did gather up metallic debris. He did escort that material to Fort Worth.

Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt on the Debris Field, 1989.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The whole Marcel family did not begin to find diaries. In going through the papers and files handed down from Jesse Marcel, Sr. to his son and then to the grandchildren in 2013, they did find a “Memorandum Book,” which the Army passed out by the thousands. I have two of them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Marcel was the author of the notations and even if he was, there is nothing in that diary to confirm the events of July 1947. The criticism about finding diaries is inaccurate.

The idea that “later someone invented 2nd crash, bodies…” is not an accurate picture either. The trouble was that we had Bill Brazil, the son of the man who found the debris field, showing us where he had picked up some of the strange debris. It is located southeast of Corona, New Mexico. We, that is Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I were able to find witnesses to that field other than just Marcel (and these include Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer who accompanied Marcel out to the field). Bill Brazel took Don and me to the debris field. He parked his truck and said that this was where he had found some of that debris. Others, such as Loretta Proctor and Bud Payne pointed to the same location.

However, during our investigation, we interviewed several officers and senior NCOs who talked about a much shorter trip to the crash site. While it took three hours or more to arrive at the debris field, they talked about a short trip of under an hour. These included Bill Rickett and Chester Barton. Brigadier General Arthur Exon told us about two sites, oriented northwest to southeast that he had flown over in the weeks that followed. Eventually, witnesses to that second site, where bodies were located, were found.

Don Schmitt and me on the Impact Site, 2023. Site was identified by
several eyewitnesses.

The stories were not invented but recovered through careful investigation and corroboration. It is established that there were two sites and we, Don, Tom and I invented nothing. We just went where the testimonies took us and reported accurately what others said. In many cases, it took long contact with the witnesses for them to trust us with the tale, and then, often, only if we didn’t reveal who they were.

Mack Brazel, the man who started this by taking samples of the metallic debris to  Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox, was held at the Roswell Army Air Field. The base Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, told me Brazel had been held in the guest house, which not the same as being in the stockade, but then, if you’re not allowed to leave, what really, is the difference?

We, Don, Tom and I talked to neighbors of Mack, such as Marian Strickland, who told us he complained about being held on the base. Neighbor Floyd Proctor told researchers that he’d seen Mack in Roswell in the company of several Army officers. That suggests that the story about his being held at the base is true even if the cell didn’t have bars... just guards watching.

So, we see that @RUTHAN667’s rant contains a single fact about Marcel embellishing his resume, which really is lying no matter how I attempt to sugarcoat it. And there are other things that Marcel said that weren’t true. If Marcel was the single witness to this, we could certainly dismiss it as a tale invented by him. But, every member of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff that we interviewed, with a single exception, verified parts of the story. When we expanded the search to other members of the 509^th Bomb Group, we found many officers and enlisted men who were involved in bits and pieces of the story. They might have seen only some of the metal recovered, or were involved in security at various sites, and even a few who did mention the bodies, the story is not stand alone. Many of them did not approach us. We found them and asked questions about those events.

I’ll note here that Major Easley, told me that the craft was extraterrestrial. Well, it was a little different than that. I asked him if we were following the right path. He asked what I meant by that and I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley in 1947. Photo courtesy
of the Roswell Army Air Field Yearbook.

There is so much more that could be said here. You want to talk about mistakes we made. Sure. We believed that Frank Kaufmann was telling the truth until we found evidence that he wasn’t. We, again Don, Mark Rodeghier, Mark Chesney and I exposed those lies in an issue of International UFO Reporter.

But the only fact that @RUTHAN667 got right was that Marcel claimed five aerial victories and had none. Everything else is misinterpretation of the facts or ignoring body of evidence that has been accumulated, vetted, repaired and reported by us. I would suggest reading Roswell in the 21^st Century and Understanding Roswell that I wrote and Tom Carey and Don Schmitt’s Witness to Roswell to get a better interpretation of the situation. And if you want the other side, I’d recommend Karl Pflock’s Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. I’d especially recommend you read the affidavit section of his book. These affidavits were gathered by several of us over many weeks.

I suggest that you, @RUTHAN667, do a little more research before you shoot your mouth off (and learn to spell) and TheSneezingMonkey, if you’re going to be skeptical and claim a deep dive, do a great deal more research.

If the mood moves me, I think next time I’ll attack the Washington National sightings. I interviewed two of the officers who were in the radar room during some of those sightings, and have transcripts of interviews with one of the fighter pilots who talked about the lights surrounding him during an attempted intercept.

And don’t even get me started on the Pascagoula abduction. Yes, I talked to both Hickson and Parker and TheSneezingMonkey wasn’t even close on his ridiculous analysis. 

True Photos of the Roswell crash site (Taken much later than 1947)

The Internet has been circling pictures that are supposed to be from the Roswell UFO crash site. (Okay, I know it is a human behind in and not the Internet). There are very few people who have been on both sites. Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and me are among that rather small group. This means that I can say, with little fear of contradiction, those pictures are not from the Roswell site. The terrain is wrong.

Both real sites are more open. This is high desert so that isn’t a lot of sand as many people believe. I’m not sure where those pictures were taken, but certainly not on either the debris field or the impact site.

Following are pictures taken on both sites… Long after the events of 1947. I took some of them myself, and others, using my camera took some of them. I mention that only because I’m in some of the pictures.

Tom Carey, center, on the Debris Field as identified by
by Bill Brazel in the early 1990s.

Don Schmitt on the right, Tim Saunders, center and me 
on the other end, standing on the Impact Site. This
gives a somewhat limited view of the site.

Don and me on the Impact Site. You can see the  open
nature of the ground behind us.

You can see for yourselves the wide-open nature of those areas. For those interested, they are either on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land or private property.

As I say, there is so much circulating on the Internet that is inaccurate, I thought I should correct that one small segment. 

Roswell, Sheridan Cavitt and Project Mogul

 

As I mentioned on Coast-to-Coast AM recently, I found another of those one-off UFO magazines that attempts to capitalize on the interest in alien visitation. I looked at the Roswell entry and noticed they mentioned the Project Mogul nonsense. I have covered this at length on this blog and in my recent books about the Roswell crash/retrieval. I’ll make one quick point here. Well, maybe two…

First, Flight No. 4, listed as the culprit here, that is, this flight was the one that allegedly scattered the debris for Mack Brazel to find was not launched. The documentation tells us that the flight was canceled. I do not understand how this documentation can be overlooked. If the flight didn’t fly, it did not scatter the debris.

There is a second point. According to what Charles Moore, one of the engineers who worked on the project back in 1947, told me, Flight No. 4, was configured just like Flight No. 5. While there is no schematic for Flight No. 4 (reinforcing the idea that it didn’t fly), we have the schematic for Flight No. 5, courtesy of the Air Force investigation of the Roswell case. There were no rawin radar targets on that flight, which raises the question, “Where did the rawin target photographed in General Ramey’s office originate?” It certainly didn’t come from Roswell.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data at the school
library in Socorro. Photo by Kevin randle

Second, the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt, the CIC officer in Roswell at the time, carries great weight. However, what Cavitt told Don Schmitt and me when we met him, he wasn’t even in Roswell at the time. Later, he would tell Don and me, that he was too busy with security investigations to be chasing weather balloons.

I did ask him, given that the description of the officer who accompanied Jesse Marcel, Sr. out to the debris, meaning he was a West Texas boy who could ride horses, about his denial. He said that it sounded like him, but he insisted that he had not gone to the debris field.

Now, this could be boiled down to me spreading tales, but there is documentation about this. In the Air Force report, The Roswell Report: Fact vs Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Cavitt’s interview conducted by Colonel Richard Weaver is published. Weaver asked about the incident that happened during the early part of July. Cavitt responded:

We went out to this site. There were no, as I understand, check points or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil… I do not remember if Marcel was there or not on the site. He could have been. We took it back to the intelligence room… in the CIC office.

RW: What did you think it was when you recovered it?

SC: I thought it was a weather balloon.

I always wonder why, if Cavitt had identified the material while still on the ranch, he hadn’t communicated this rather important piece of intelligence to Colonel Blanchard and saved him the embarrassment of telling the world they had recovered a flying saucer… but I digress.

I have a letter, written by Cavitt to Doyle Rees, one time officer in charge of the CIC office in Albuquerque, on December 6, 1989. He was answering a letter from Rees, which I think was generated by the original Unsolved Mysteries show on Roswell that had aired several weeks earlier. I think this because that show is mentioned in the letter.

In the letter, Cavitt wrote, “…Marcel was a smart man; a good friend, a Louisiana Cajun, who was prone to be excitable, and, in this case wrong in that Cavitt had been along on that caper.”

Sheridan Cavitt interview in Arizona with Kevin Randle and
Don Schmitt. Photo by Kevin Randle

I don’t know why Cavitt would lie to Rees, unless had not been the senior officer of the CIC in the area at the time, and therefore, hadn’t been read into the crash when he, Rees, arrived in Albuquerque. The point is that Cavitt told fellow CIC officer, Rees, he hadn’t been there, but then told Weaver that not only was he there, he recognized the debris as that from a weather balloon…

Of course, that still doesn’t explain the picture of the rawin target taken in Ramey’s office, that was published on July 9, 1947, for all the world to see. Where did that debris originate?

Roger Ramey and Thomas DuBose with the remains of a rawin target. Since there
were no rawin targets on the early flights of Mogul balloons, the question
 is where did the rawin originate?

But, of course, that’s fine because we all know that it was really part of Project Mogul…

(Blogger’s Note: For those interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Project Mogul explanation, I recommend Roswell in the 21^st Century. This provides more evidence that Project Mogul was not a part of this story until injected into it in the late 1980s.)

Jake Barber: UFO Retrieval Whistleblower

Last Saturday night, (January 18) NewsNation aired a segment that featured Jake Barber who claimed that he had seen a “nonhuman” egg-shaped aircraft and had been recruited for a top-secret government UFO crash/retrieval program. Unlike David Grusch who talked of hearing of such things from credible but unnamed sources, Barber said that he had participated in retrievals.

I probably should point out here that neither of these “whistleblowers” was the first to make claims of an involvement in some sort of government UFO crash retrieval program. Among the first was Clifford Stone, a mid-level Army NCO, who claimed to have been involved in several such operations and had even seen the “alien autopsy file,” not long after he had joined the Army. I mention this because Stones’ revelations were little more than invention that was not backed up by any sort of independent evidence.

The late Cliff Stone, who claimed to be on the inside
of a secret program involved with crash retrievals.

According to NewsNation, which had checked Barber’s records, he was a talented airplane mechanic who was deployed on several presidential support missions. He had been recruited into the Air Force’s Elite Combat Control unit suggesting he was a helicopter pilot (though it is unclear if he had been a military pilot), freefall parachutist, expert marksman and the recipient of a NATO top-secret security clearance, known as Cosmic Top Secret and service in Bosnia, for which he earned an unidentified valor award. They don’t reveal what award that might be. Stones’ records provided no corroboration for his tales.

To indicate the off-world nature of the retrievals, Barber said, “Just visually looking at the object on the ground, you could tell that it was extraordinary and anomalous. It was not human.” The craft was metallic, pearly white, and about the size of an SUV.

Normally, I am skeptical of these sorts of claims and I believe we all should be as well. However, my own experiences in both Air Force and Army intelligence suggests there might be some truth to it.

Because of my status in the military, that is as an intelligence officer, and because some knew of my interest in UFOs, I occasionally received nuggets of information about UFO cases that haven’t been reported or that have had little military interest. Bob Cornett and I might have been among the first to gain access to the Project Blue Book records while they were still housed as Maxwell Air Force Base and had not been redacted, taking out the names of the witnesses.

Bob Cornett reviewing UFO records while on assignment from
a magazine in the 1970s.

One of the first cases we wanted to see was from November 1953 that involved the disappearance of an Air Force fighter. The Blue Book file was just two pages and it was noted that it was an aircraft accident rather than a UFO report. According to an Air Force colonel who was stationed at Kinross Air Force Base said that in November 1953, a jet fighter was scrambled to intercept an unknown target, meaning a UFO, over the Soo Locks on Lake Superior. The intercept was watched on radar, the two blips, that is the UFO and the jet, merged but never separated. That single blip flew off the scope and disappeared in the distance. From the point of the merge, there had been no further communication with the fighter. The jet was never found. The colonel told me that there had been two schools of thought. One was that the UFO abducted the jet and the second was that it had crashed into the lake.

That is the sort of thing that I believe David Grusch heard when he talked about UFO crashes. People who were at the right place at the right time to know something more than the public provided that information. The colonel believed that the jet had been abducted, or in his words, the UFO took it. I wasn’t there, but the source had been. I knew him and he was credible but then where do you go with such a tale. If it is highly classified, how do I, as a civilian now, break through that barrier. Besides, attempts to learn more about it, other than the mundane and unclassified, have failed. I’m pointed back to the information and documentation that I already had.

In a somewhat similar vein, Don Schmitt and I interviewed a general at the Pentagon. Well, interviewed might be an over statement. He agreed to meet us in a snack bar on one of the lowest levels. The tables were about waist high or higher, so that people had a place to set a plate, but there were no stools. It was a get in, get your food, eat it and get out place.

We wanted to talk about the Roswell case. Don had apparently chatted with him at some point, explaining what we were after which is information about Roswell. By this time, we had talked to many witnesses to the crash and knew more about it. We had rejected the balloon answer and had even interviewed three of those who had been in General Ramey’s office on July 8, 1947.

We were inside the Pentagon for about fifteen or twenty minutes. The general didn’t look nervous. He just told us that there was an area in the Pentagon to which he had no access. He said that our Roswell information was there. He didn’t elaborate. Just hinted that highly classified information about Roswell was in that area, and those entering had to have a specific request and their time in that area was limited. I would later talk to another man who had said he had seen the classified version Project Blue Book and described for me. He said he saw some of the pictures of crashed UFOs and the recovery operations that had been conducted. I don’t know if these classified Blue Book files were part of that section of the Pentagon to which the general had referred.

I have also talked with another general who said he knew the photographer who photographed Roswell bodies, but didn’t provide very much information about that. I need to point out that by the time the information got to me, it was third-hand. The general hadn’t seen the pictures, he had just talked to one of those men who took them.

I suppose I should mention the retired MSGT who said that he’d provided the rawin target for the Roswell explanation. What he had said to Cornett and me, was that he had taken a balloon into an area to show the witnesses what they had seen. This was before I had talked with Irving Newton, the weather officer who identified the wreckage in Fort Worth. He said they didn’t have rawin targets on the FWAAF, but did know where to get one if it was needed.

The MSGT was careful about what he told us, but the implication was that he had taken the balloon around the Roswell area. I have assumed that it was part it was part of the 1947 cover up, but when Bob and I talked to him, neither of us knew much about the Roswell case. I had read Frank Edward’s laughable description of the Roswell case in his Flying Saucers – Serious Business, but that didn’t contain much information other than it happened near Roswell and the Air Force had explained it, in Edward’s words, as a pie tin hooked to a kite.

All these are incidents, in which I was involved to some extent. Like those being talked about today, they suggest that these retrievals do happen. Sometimes the information is limited and we must deduce where it is going. Sometimes it is more explicit. What it does confirm is there was a cover up then and it remains in place now. 

Committee on Oversight and Accountability Meeting November 13

Yes, I sat through the two hours and fifteen minutes (there about) of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability meeting about what is going on in the world of UAP. In the opening remarks by Nancy Mace, we are told that UAP demand attention (with which I think we all agree). Quoting a Colonel Carl, she said that there were non-humans interacting with us and that high-ranking people knew it. That is a somewhat provocative statement with which to open the hearing. You can watch the hearing here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT2iWKZr0qA

Robert Garcia told us that the Main Stream Media is taking the matter seriously, or more seriously than in the past. He also noted that the hearings were about getting at the truth.

There were those on the committee who told us other things that we all knew. We were told that the allegations by David Grusch have not been verified. Although Garcia didn’t elaborate, he was referring to the claim that there had been twelve crash retrievals. We are told that some of the committee members, maybe all of them, want more legislation for the study of UAP and we all know how well congressional legislation has been in helping us get at the truth in the past.

I noticed that we get some history, or rather a mention of history when Jared Moskowitz said that investigations went back to 1945, which is probably a reference to the Foo Fighters of the Second World War.

Once all the members had a chance to make statements, the emphasis switched to the witnesses that were retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, Lue Elizondo, Michael Shellenberger and Michael Gold. They were asked, in turn they thought of the UAP situation and all suggested something outside of our technological abilities existed, but not that it was necessarily from alien visitation.

Swearing in of the witnesses. From left to right Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet,
Lue Elizondo, Michael Shellenberger and Michael Gold.

Gallaudet said that while serving in the Navy, in a large-scale exercise, he received an email about the intrusion of unknown craft that seemed to be a danger to that exercise, specifically, the aviation assets that were being employed. The email, from a higher authority, wondered if there was some secret project, to which he knew nothing that might account for these intrusions and if they continued, they would cancel the exercise. Gallaudet said that the next day, the email was gone and in the after-action briefings, that concern was never mentioned… And, now, as far as I know, based on the testimony, there are no copies of the email offered in evidence.

I hadn’t expected much in this hearing, but Lue Elizondo did make several comments that were interesting. He said that UAP were real and that the US was in possession of UAP material, though he didn’t specify what that material might be, and that some foreign nations also had access to some form of alien material.

Once they got beyond the opening statements which seemed to include most of the free world, each member in attendance was given five minutes to ask questions or to pontificate. Here is where I thought we might get into the nuts and bolts of the situation but that somehow evaded us.

In the questions address to Gallaudet, especially those about the intrusions during the exercise, we learned nothing new. His answers to some of those questions was that he was prohibited from talking about specifics in a public forum. He would answer them in a closed session.

We had a similar experience with Elizondo. He mentioned that those answers he could give were in his book, which had been in review by officials in the Pentagon for more than year before it was published. He said there were crash retrievals, but he would only talk about them in a closed session.

Later in the hearings, Elizondo would mention bodies. He said bodies were collected before he was born. I believe this is a vague reference to the Roswell case, which is from July 1947. But he would also say that he couldn’t talk about retrievals in an open session.

Shellenberger, who was the source of the information about Immaculate Constellation, said that he trusted his sources on that information, but he wouldn’t reveal them. He said that were either still in he government or had been in the government, but not in which agencies they have worked. He also said that his sources had told him that the government was sitting on piles of information about UAP, including high resolution photographs and other material. But he wouldn’t say who these sources were, only that they were credible, based on his knowledge of who they were and his checking out their backgrounds.

Gold provided a good answer on why some of this information has been hidden. It could expose weaknesses in our capability to respond to the threats. That would be information that our adversaries in the world would want to have.

Update: Shellenberger had provided a document about Immaculate Constellation to the committee members prior to the beginning of the session. Thanks to Nancy Mace, you can read that document here:

https://mace.house.gov/immaculateconstellation 

There is one point that I should make and here is probably the best place. There was a discussion that military personnel had been injured by UFOs and that those people were being compensated for those injuries. Once again, no names were offered, but I thought immediately of John Burroughs who had been injured during the Rendlesham Forest events of December 1980.

I also know of others who claimed they were injured by UFOs, including Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum, coincidentally during their sighting of a glowing, diamond-shaped object also in December 1980. Neither of the women were compensated by the government.

This provides a short rundown on what went on in those two hours and fifteen minutes of hearing. When one committee member said that those on the committee who wanted additional information and didn’t know where to begin to look for it (and I sympathize with them on that point), he was told that the information could be discussed in a closed session.

My problem was that we learned nothing new, there were no sources named or documents presented, other than one that was so heavily redacted that it was useless*, and all the information was second hand at best. I have said before and I’ll say it again, Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I have talked to the men and women who had first-hand knowledge. We can name names and have taped, both audio and video, of these witnesses.

There were some positives that came out of the hearing. I mean, here was a hearing about UAP with suggestions of an off-world presence, observed technology that was beyond our means to create, an interest in the topic by the Main Stream Media that was not wrapped in ridicule, and a suggestion that an unbiased, scientific investigation was needed.  

The members of the committee seemed to be interested in the topic and were searching for answers rather than attempting to misrepresent the situation and taking the discussion into areas that have nothing to do with the problem. All the witnesses, who were under oath, when asked, answered that they believed, based on their person experiences that the answer was alien visitation or that they didn’t know what the answer might be. There didn’t seem to be anyone who ridiculed the idea that we have been visited alien creatures.

There was a suggestion that the stigma be removed from reporting of UAP because, to solve the problem, the information must be received by those who can use it. If people are afraid to report what they have seen or experienced, then no research can be conducted and we solve no problems.

In reality, this hearing was what I expected, long on suggestion but short on evidence. Too many times, the answer to a specific question was that the witness couldn’t talk about it in an open hearing, or that his sources would not be revealed. There was nothing that we, on the outside, could do to learn more, no real cases that we could study because we don’t have the necessary information, and a little too much speculation. I can’t say that I was disappointed in the hearing because I didn’t expect it to reveal very much.

Or, as my good friend from Operation Iraqi Freedom would say after many staff meetings, “There is two hours and fifteen minutes that I won’t get back.”

*Stan Friedman used to show a heavily redacted report that contained only one or two words per page. When the whole document was eventually released, we learned it had little to do with UFO research and a great deal to do with intelligence collections methods. 

Mysteries Uncovered - A Semi-review of a Book

 

In this episode of why I’m beginning to dislike Ufology, I have planned something of a rant against all the negative comments directed at me. These are challenges to my military background, my education, and that I write science fiction, though Stan Friedman once accused me of writing romances. But rather than do that, I’m going to mention a book I stumbled onto that sort of underscores the trouble with the UFO field.

Mysteries Uncovered, with the subtitle of True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained by Emily G. Thompson, caught my attention because in the promotional material, it mentioned the Roswell case. Well, here was a writer who had never actually been to Roswell or who had never interviewed any of the witnesses, but who was providing us with an analysis of the case. Naturally, I had to see what she had to say.

The book is loaded with analyses of many of the things that catch our attention here beginning with the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the Mary Celeste and several UFO related topics. Yes, I turned immediately to the chapter cleverly entitled, The Roswell Incident.

On the first page of that entry, after a brief synopsis of the case, there is a quote from Dr. Robert A. Baker, a hardcore skeptic. He said “It’s a modern myth, a kind of religion. There is a common human need for salvation, and it’s always coming from above.”

That didn’t bode well for the entry, but the text wasn’t quite that bad. However, in the first sentence, she told us about Mac Brazel, not realizing that it’s been a couple of decades since it was discovered by Tom Carey that he was actually Mack Brazel. This suggested that she hadn’t done the in-depth research that would have provided that small nugget of information.

She provides some descriptions that are attributed to Mack Brazel, but he never said anything like that to anyone. She wrote, “The wreckage consisted of metal, some of which was dull and some of with was shiny and thin, resembling tinfoil. There was also something that looked like transparent plastic string or wire, and thin sticks shaped like I-beams, made from a material that Brazel was unable to identify.”

It was Bill Brazel who told Don Schmitt and me about those items. She missed the important point. Bill told us that when you shined a light in one end of that plastic string it came out the other. He said that it resembled monofilament fishing line but he was talking about fiber optics.

She wrote about the size of what we have been calling the debris field. She wrote that he, meaning Mack, estimated that the wreckage covered an area of three-quarters of a mile long and 200 to three hundred feet wide. “It appeared as though some kind of machine had exploded in midair and wreckage from it had rained down of the earth.”

But we know the size of the debris field is based on descriptions from both Bill Brazel and Jesse Marcel, Sr, the Air Intelligence Officer of the military unit stationed at Roswell. The description was not provided by Mack Brazel.

And all this is in just the first paragraph.

After some discussion of other, irrelevant sightings in New Mexico, she reported that Brazel drove into Roswell to talk to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. She wrote that Brazel might receive a reward for the discovery.

On the July 4 weekend, there were reports of various organizations each offering a thousand-dollar reward for proof about the flying saucers. But, according to the newspaper reports, that information wasn’t available to Brazel until after he made the trek to Roswell and there has been no evidence presented that Brazel knew about that money. The reason for the trip, was, allegedly to sell some wool, but the real reason was he wanted to know who was responsible for all that debris and who was going to clean up the mess.

Yes, I could continue to pick apart this entry, but what is the real point? Instead, I’ll move to the discussion of Project Mogul, the culprit blamed for the wreckage. She reported, accurately, that the Air Force launched an investigation after several members of Congress asked for that investigation in the mid-1990s. But then wrote, “… the debris found near Corona was related to Project Mogul, a top-secret program aimed at using balloons to spy on Soviet nuclear tests. They claimed that the wreckage was part of a 600-ft balloon train…”

This really isn’t her fault but the balloon arrays launched in New Mexico had been reduced to 400 feet and contained common weather balloons and no rawin radar reflectors early in the New Mexico launches. She wrote, based on the Air Force report, “They claimed that this was peculiar material found at the crash site that neither Major Marcel or [sic] Brazel could identify.”

But they should have been able to identify it. There was nothing special, nothing classified about the balloon arrays being launched in New Mexico. They were standard, off the shelf neoprene weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors. A farmer in Circleville, Ohio, Sherman Campbell, found a weather balloon and radar reflector in one of this fields on that July 4 weekend, and knew exactly what it was.  He took it to the local sheriff, who also knew what it was. Even if Brazel hadn’t recognized it, Marcel should have.

While I hesitate to get back into the arguments about Project Mogul, there are other points to be made. Thompson quoted Charles Moore, who worked on what he was quick to point out to me that this was the New York University balloon project. She wrote, “Moore claimed that the balloons were equipped with corner reflectors [rawin radar targets] that were put together with balsa wood and coated with synthetic resin glue similar to that made by Elmer, to strengthen them.”

But Moore told me, when I visited him in Socorro, New Mexico, that the make-up of Flight No. 4, the culprit in this discussion, was the same as that as what was termed “the first successful flight,” Flight No. 5. However, the diagram of Flight No. 5, as published in the Air Force report had no radar reflectors on it and none were used on any flight in New Mexico until much later in the process.

The configuration of Flight #5. Charles Moore told me that Flight #4 was configured in the same way. Notice there are NO rawin targets on the flight Also notice the other components which were not among they types of debris described by the witnesses.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I provided for him as we attempted to determine the flight path of Flight #4. Photo by Kevin Randle, taken in Socorro, New Mexico in the early 1990s. It was during our discussions that Moore supplied information about the activities in 1947.

Thompson then discussed the Alien Autopsy that surfaced about that time, meaning 1995. It has very little to do with the Roswell case and is an admitted hoax. Nearly everyone involved in the hoax have come forward and there are photographs of them putting together the “alien” creature that appears in the film.

To keep this from getting away, meaning too long, Thompson provided us with the Glenn Dennis tale of the nurse who saw the alien bodies. Dennis said that she had told him about seeing the aliens in the base hospital and within days she had been transferred out of Roswell. He had written to her once, but the letter came back marked, “Deceased.” Dennis said that she, with four other nurses, had been killed in an aircraft accident. But there is no record of any such aircraft accident that took the lives of five Army nurses at the time.

Thompson wrote, “The nurse was never identified.” However, Dennis, reluctantly, gave researchers the name of the nurse. In fact, her name, Naomi Self or Selff, was well known among those who were involved in research on the Roswell case. But no one could verify that there was ever a nurse by that name in the Army, let alone stationed in Roswell. The search expanded to the local hospitals with the same results. Told that there was no nurse named Naomi Self, Dennis then said that he hadn’t given anyone the right name, but then gave another one, which was a major change in his story.

The real point is that the Dennis testimony about the nurse was discredited more than a quarter century ago. That information has been published repeatedly. I covered in The Randle Report: UFOs in the 1990s, published in 1997. I wrote then, “But others, such as Glenn Dennis, who has been considered one of the important witnesses, have begun to collapse. There is little that can be said except that we have found nothing to confirm that his nurse exists or existed. And when challenged on these points, be begins to change the tale.”

In her book, Thompson discusses other UFO events such as the Flatwood monster, Barney and Betty Hill and the Rendlesham Forest encounter. I had thought about reviewing those segments here as well, but this is getting longer than I intended. I will only note here that she reports on the testimony of Larry Warren who claimed involvement in the Rendlesham Forest events, but that testimony has been discredited. Colonel Charles Halt noted that he didn’t remember Warren being there at all, and that contrary to Warren’s statements, he did not approach the object in the woods. Thompson does acknowledge this controversy.

Peter Robbins, who co-authored the book, Left at East Gate with Larry Warren, has since repudiated Warren’s involvement the case. You can read Peter’s long entries about his reasons for this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left_10.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left.html

Those entries were written by Peter and were posted to this blog with his permission. Thompson does write about the controversy with Warren’s statements, but the account might have been stronger if she had left Warren out of the discussion or reduced him to a footnote. There were others, such as Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, not to mention Charles Halt, who were clearly there.

Again, this criticism is a little bit nitpicky, but when dealing with a case where there is so much information, testimony and legitimate players, it does seem to be a waste to mention Warren at all.

I guess I must say that I was disappointed in the quality of the reporting on the Roswell case, but then it is quite complex and there have been dozens of books written about it. I have contributed five of them, and, of course, mentioned the case in dozens of magazine articles and appeared in a dozen or more documentaries and television programs dealing with the crash. And if you look at my earlier work, you’ll find errors in it that are the result of publishing preliminary data. However, it just seems that a solid report on Roswell can be written. I saw that she didn’t reference any of the skeptical books about the case and mentioned Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt twice in the bibliography of the Roswell case.

The real problem is that I know the mistakes made in the segments that deal with UFO related events and I must wonder is there are similar problems with the other segments. Would someone well versed in the Lost Colony of Roanoke be able to find significant errors in the reporting? Or in the section about Amelia Earhart?

If this was a real review, then I would note that the book is 373 pages long and is available from Amazon both as an ebook and in a print version. There is no index but there are footnotes which are not quite as comprehensive as I would like. It just strikes me that this was a book written with no real passion for the subjects mentioned.

Although I rarely mention books that I do not like, the Roswell information was too far off the mark to allow it to pass. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I would recommend.