Chasing Footnotes, Jesse Marcel and the Gouge

In the last few days I have been in communication with a number of friends about the Roswell case and what I have discovered in my reinvestigation of it. At one point I had mentioned that the description of the gouge on the debris field was problematic because there was only Bill Brazel who had reported it. The response was there were three other witnesses who had described the gouge complete with a list of sources for the information.

Bill Brazel stands on the Debris
Field. Photo copyright by Kevin
Randle,

Switching gears now, I mention that as you all know, I have been chasing footnotes to see if we can reduce it to the original source as a way of confirming that the information has been accurately reported. I have done this to several others and now it seems that it is my turn.

To bring those two divergent thoughts together, it was pointed out that Jesse Marcel had talked about the gouge and a friend quoted UFO Crash at Roswell, page 50 as his source. It said, “Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet across with a gouge at the top end of it that was about five hundred feet long and ten feet wide.”

Len Stringfield

The footnote took me to Len Stringfield’s UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome which was published by MUFON in 1980. The footnote didn’t give a page number in that document but I found it was entry Case A-10 on page 16. Stringfield does name Marcel and tells us that Stringfield and Marcel had served in the same areas in the Pacific Theater during the WW II.

He then wrote, “The debris of an apparent metallic aerial device, or craft, that had exploded in the air, or crashed, was first made known by a sheep rancher… There he had found many metal fragments and what appeared to be ‘parchment’ strew in a 1-mile-square area.”

A very liberal interpretation of that could be that there had been some sort of disturbance to the soil, and when connected to what Bill Brazel had said, might be an accurate description. Marcel never actually said anything about seeing a gouge, so this is apparently a little of that literary license that has no place in this sort of report.

Looking at the newspaper articles published in 1947, there are a variety of sizes given for the debris field and Brazel, in one of those news stories agreed with the size as given by Marcel. While all that is interesting, it doesn’t give us a gouge in the middle of the field.

Robin Adair, who worked for the Associated Press in 1947, and in opposition with what Jason Kellahin claimed in a separate interview of what the two of them had experienced, said that he had flown over the area. Adair said that they were kept at a distance by soldiers waving them off and feared that those on the ground might fire on their aircraft if they got too close. He did, however, suggest a gouge without actually using that term. He said there were burned places and added, “I remember four indications… it was rather hard to line them up from the plane.”

He said, “It wasn’t too distinct – one – among the grass that was about a foot high or maybe a little more it wasn’t too distinguishable but you could tell something had been there.”

Later he said, “You couldn’t see them too good from the air – how deep they were or anything but apparently the way it cut into them whatever hit the ground…”

According to the taped interview, conducted by Don Schmitt, Adair never said that he’d seen a gouge in the sense that Brazel has seen one. To him it looked as if something had skipped creating a series of depressions (I’m trying to avoid the word gouge here to provide a somewhat more neutral impression) that, looked at from ground level would have resembled a longer cut in the soil. Frankly, it seems that he was talking about something that could be interpreted as a gouge.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon said that he had flown over the locations some months after the event. I’m not sure why he would have done that or why he would remember, but he did talk about seeing the crash sites. He wrote to me in November, 1991, that he remembered “auto tracks leading to the pivotal sites and obvious gouges in the terrain.”

He wrote about them as “gouges” which seems to confirm what Adair had said and both men were flying over the area which might explain why they used the plural when Brazel spoke in the singular.

Bud Payne describing his observations on the same bit
of high desert as identified by Bill Brazel.

Finally, there was Bud Payne who eventually became a judge in Lincoln County. He blundered into the area chasing some livestock that gotten away from him. In an interview with him in January 1990, he took a number of us including Don Schmitt, Paul Davids and me to the debris field that he had seen. Although the interview was not recorded, my notes say that he did say there had been a gouge, and we were standing on the same bit of New Mexico high desert that Bill Brazel had pointed out to us some months earlier.

In looking back through my notes, transcripts, and other documentation, I found references to a gouge or gouges in the terrain that seemed to back up the original descriptions given by Bill Brazel. Granted, the interviews were conducted decades after the event, and the survey of newspaper articles which sometimes provided a description of the debris field did not seem to mention a gouge or gouges. The point here is that there are multiple sources for the idea of a gouge, even if that description wasn’t universal.

This was also about chasing footnotes, and the reference I used as a source for the information about Marcel came from the monograph that Len Stringfield published in 1980. The important sentence here said, “The area was thoroughly checked, he [Marcel] said, but no fresh impact depressions were found in the sand.”

Bob Pratt interviewed Marcel about a year later, in December 1979 and while his interest was in talking about debris, Marcel did say, “One thing I did notice – nothing actually hit the ground, bounced on the ground. It was something that must have exploded above the ground and fell.”

While it could be argued, somewhat lamely, that those impact depressions aren’t the same thing as a long gouge, Marcel seemed to be telling both Stringfield and Pratt that he had seen no gouge.

I don’t know how that line “Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet across with a gouge at the top end of it that was about five hundred feet long and ten feet wide,” got inserted into the text. It’s not in quotation marks which means it was an interpretation of what Marcel had said. The probable answer is that it was a combination of what both Brazel and Marcel had said, which means the description is somewhat correct, based on those testimonies, but it isn’t accurate.

A better statement might have been “Marcel said that it was about three-quarters of a mile long and two to three hundred feet across and Brazel mentioned a gouge at the top end of it that was about five hundred feet long and ten feet wide.”

It turns out that the statement attributed to Marcel is one that is not found in the source I quoted. In fact, it’s not found in any of the sources I was able to access here over the last few days. The information attributed to Marcel is incorrect and the footnote is inaccurate.

I have now found references to disturbances to the soil, and I have found that Marcel never talked about a gouge. The information here is now accurate and the sources are attributed properly. I can only hope that these clarifications will make their way into the Roswell discussions.

The Size of the Debris Field

Since I posted the article that suggested that Bessie Brazel’s testimony might be in error and that it was contradicted by that given by so many others, we have been all over the board. Nearly everyone was selecting that data which tended to support their position and ignore everything else. So, I thought I would take some of those points and provide the data available about them. I realize that some of you are so far to one side or the other that any sort of compromise is impossible, but for those who are interested in all the information, I will try to publish a series of articles that look at some aspect of this case.

First, I’ll tackle the size of the debris field because it seems to range from a square mile down to an area about 200 feet in diameter. That’s quite a big difference, and I know that we’ll never reach a consensus, but heck; we might have a little fun and learn something by accident.

The testimonies given after 1978 which is when Jesse Marcel, Sr. was identified as having recovered pieces of a flying saucer provide some of the data. Marcel himself told Bill Moore (The Roswell Incident, p. 63) that it was “about three quarters of a mile long and a couple of hundred feet wide.”

Stan Friedman, in his book, Crash at Corona (p.10) wrote of Marcel’s description, “The area covered with wreckage was roughly three quarters of a mile long and several hundred yards wide.”

Moore also quotes Walt Whitmore, Jr. as giving a description. Whitmore hadn’t seen the field before the Army cleaned it up, according to his testimony at that time. Moore wrote (p. 89), “Several days later Whitmore, Jr., ventured out to the site and found a stretch of about 175 – 200 yards of pastureland uprooted in a sort of fan-like pattern with most of the damage at the narrowest part of the fan.”

Whitmore told Karl Pflock (p. 154), “The debris covered a fan- or roughly triangle-shaped area, which was about 10 or 12 feet wide at what I thought was the top end. From there it extended about 100 to 150 feet, widening out to about 150 feet at the base. This area was covered with many, many bits of material.”

Bill Brazel, who hadn’t seen the debris in the field except for the small pieces he said he had found, also talked of a gouge that ran through the pasture. He said that it was narrow at one end spread out toward the center and then narrowed again. Although he didn’t give us a length of the gouge, he eventually took us to what he thought of as the top of the gouge. Later, during the CUFOS archaeological dig there, we measured down from that point, about three quarters of a mile, placing little flags along the way.

Flags placed to show the gouge during the CUFOS
archaeological dig in the early 1990s.

Bud Payne, who was a judge in New Mexico, said that he had been out to the debris field but had been turned back by the military cordon. He did get close to it and this would be irrelevant, except he took me out to the location he thought was the debris field. When he stopped his vehicle and we got out, I nearly stepped on one of those little flags we had placed there. We have attempted to gather them all but had missed the last one. Payne took me to the same three quarter of a mile stretch of New Mexico desert and through this provided, to a degree, the size of the field.

And, of course, there is the testimony in the affidavit signed by Bessie Brazel. She said, “There was a lot of debris scattered sparsely over an area that seems to me now to have about the size of a football field [or about an acre].”

The most widely quoted size of the field is that given by Marcel. It can be found in a number of books but as noted here, it is traceable to that interview supplied to Bill Moore.

We are told, of course, that these memories are decades old and might be unreliable. Studies of memory and how it works suggest that confabulation (as opposed to lying) can often fill in gaps in memory, that each time a memory is accessed it is subject to alteration, and sometimes the memories simply no longer exist, yet the witness (I can think of no other word that fits here because they were involved in 1947) as he or she concentrates begins to put together a story that seems plausible.

We do have quite a few newspaper stories that were written in 1947, literally within hours of some of the men walking the fields, so that their memories should be clear and accurate. I say this knowing full well that some of the information given to the reporters was less than accurate and some of it that was published had been misunderstood.

The Roswell Daily Record, for example, reported, “The rubber [from the debris] was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.”

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in a later edition of their “Disc-overy Near Roswell Identified as Weather Balloon by FWAAF Officer,” reported, “Brazell [sic], whose ranch is 30 miles from the nearest telephone and has no radio, knew nothing about flying discs when he found the broken remains of the weather device scattered over a square mile of his land.”

The Albuquerque Tribune, in a story attributed to Jason Kellahin on July 9 reported, “Scattered with the materials over an area about 200 yards across were pieces of gray rubber.”

What does this tell us about the size of the debris field? Not much, actually. Those who wish to believe it was small, have several sources they can quote. Cavitt, in his interview with Colonel Richard Weaver didn’t provide a very vivid account of the size. He said that it was about twenty feet, but the statements were somewhat confusing. He might have been describing what he suspected was the size of the object or he might have been describing the distribution of the debris. He told Weaver, “Some here, some here, some here. No concentration of it. No marks on the ground, dug up, anything hidden or anything like that, just out on the territory around the bottom of New Mexico…” 

I don’t believe Whitmore’s testimony on this is reliable but suspect there was some collusion between Max Littell of the Roswell museum and Whitmore to come up with some debris, no matter what it was. They talked about creating a display in Roswell, but I don’t believe that Littell had thought that through. If Whitmore’s debris were pieces of a balloon, as he suggested to Pflock, then the mystique of the Roswell case eroded at that point and not many people would drive out of the way to look at a museum dedicated to a weather balloon.

Whitmore had told Moore that the site had been cleaned before he got there but contradicted that when he told Pflock that he saw the debris and even claimed to have some of it. The debris had been locked in his safe deposit box, but when the box grew too full, he moved the debris to his “junk room.” Although searches were made, nothing was ever found. It was just one more bit of debris that vanished.

There is Jesse Marcel’s testimony about the size of the field which he gave after 1978, but there is one story that provides some corroboration which was published in 1947. In Linda Corley’s book, Marcel said, “It was about a mile long and several hundred feet wide of debris.”

Brazel, according to one newspaper account agreed with that size, saying it was scattered over a square mile of the land. This was in a story other than the one written by J. Bond Johnson.

Returning to the Roswell Daily Record, Brazel, it seems, was saying that the debris field was about 200 yards in diameter and the Albuquerque Tribune changed the wording to 200 yards across which is not quite the same thing but is close. The by-line on the Albuquerque Tribune story, as noted, was by Kellahin, so he was apparently working from his notes made in Roswell.

All this means is that if you are a skeptic, you have some evidence that the size of the debris field was relatively small. If you are a believer, you have some evidence that the debris field is relatively large. You have the majority of the testimonies suggesting a large field from the record after 1978 but Bessie Brazel suggests it was about 100 yards by 50 yards, or about the size of a football field.

Or, in other words, this is a wash. Whatever side you come down on, there is testimony to support it. Not exactly a profound finding but just an observation that suggests there are facts for everyone to cherry pick.

Jason Kellahin and his Roswell Tale

(Blogger’s note: Since this has come up, I thought I’d republish, with appropriate updates, the article from my The Roswell Encyclopedia about this. I believe I was the first to interview Jason Kellahin, first briefly on the telephone, and then in his home. I did notice one thing as we walked through his house. There was a copy of The Roswell Incident on his desk, as well as a number of newspaper articles about the Roswell crash that he referred to periodically. Clearly he had been reviewing that material before I had arrived and just as clearly that influenced what he told me based on the documented facts available. That interview was videotaped and a copy was provided to the Fund for UFO Research and does not agree with the affidavit that he signed some time later.)

Jason Kellahin was an AP reporter based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947. He received a call from the New York office of the Associated Press telling him that he needed to get down to Roswell as quickly as possible. According to Kellahin, "We [Kellahin and Robin Adair] were informed of the discovery down there...the bureau chief sent me and a teletype operator from the Albuquerque office." Please note that he specifically mentioned the discovery down there.

I interviewed Kellahin in his home more than forty years later and he told me then, "It must have been in the morning because we went down there in the daytime. It would take a couple of hours to get down there..."

Jason Kellahin at his home.

Kellahin continued, saying, "We went down to Vaughn [New Mexico]. Just south of Vaughn is where they found the material."

The ranch, according to Kellahin, wasn't very far from the main highway (Highway 285) from Vaughn to Roswell. They turned from that highway just south of Vaughn, onto the Corona road. They were driving to the west and saw "a lot of cars and went over. We assumed that [this] was the place. There were officers from the air base. They were there before we got there." This does not agree with the affidavit that Kellahin would sign sometime later.

Kellahin described military cars, civilian cars and even police vehicles parked along the side of the road. In one of the fields adjacent to the road, at the far end of it, were a number of military officers, not more than five or six of them. Kellahin left his vehicle and entered the field where he saw the scattered debris.

"This man from Albuquerque with me [Adair], he had a camera. He took some pictures of the stuff lying on the ground and of the rancher who was there...Brazel was there and he [the photographer] took his picture."

Kellahin asked Brazel a few questions, interviewing him there, in the field. "I talked to him. He told me his name [Brazel] and we had been told it was on his ranch."

Convenience store in Vaughn, NM.

Kellahin didn't remember much about what Brazel had said. "About the only thing he said he walked out there and found this stuff and he told a neighbor about it and the neighbor said you ought to tell the sheriff...it was the next day [he] went down to Roswell."

Standing there in the field, near the debris, Kellahin had the chance to examine it closely. "It wasn't much of anything. Just some silver colored fabric and very light wood...a light wood like you'd make a kite with...I didn't pick it up. In fact, they [the military] asked us not to pick up anything...You couldn't pick it up and have identified it. You have to have known [what it was]. But it was a balloon. It looked more like a kite than anything else."

The debris covered a small area, not more than half an acre. The military men were standing close by as Kellahin interviewed Brazel but didn't try to interfere. "They weren't paying much attention. They didn't interfere with me. I went wherever I wanted to go. They didn't keep me off the place at all. Me or the photographer." Kellahin tried to talk to the military people, but they didn't give him any information. "They were being very, very cautious because they didn't know."

He didn't have much time for the interview because the military officers came over and told him they were finished and were going to take Brazel into Roswell. With Brazel gone and the cleanup of the debris finished, there wasn't much reason for the AP reporters to remain. Kellahin and Adair continued their trip to Roswell, arriving before dark.

Kellahin confirmed some of this, saying that "We went down to the Roswell Daily Record and I wrote a story and we sent it out on the AP wire...Adair developed his pictures and set up the wire photo equipment and sent it out."

The story about all this that appeared in the newspaper ended saying, "Adair and Kellahin were ordered to Roswell for the special assignment by the headquarters bureau of AP in New York."

Kellahin, when he left the ranch, had expected to see Brazel in Roswell, the next day, but said, "I don't recall that I did. I think the military was talking to him and wouldn't let him talk to anyone else to my recollection...I saw him there but...there were some military people with him."

Following the story as far as he could, Kellahin talked to Sheriff Wilcox. "When we got down there to the newspaper, he was there. I saw him there or at his office...By that time the military had gotten into it. He was being very cautious."

"It was a weather balloon," said Kellahin. "In my opinion that's what it was. That's what we saw. We didn't see anything else to indicate it was anything else."

Once they finished in the newspaper office, Kellahin returned to Albuquerque and Adair was ordered to return to El Paso to finish his job there. By the time Kellahin arrived in to Albuquerque, there was a new story for him that had nothing to do with flying saucers. Another assignment that was just as important as his last.

There are some points that must be made. The raw testimony from Kellahin must be put into context with that provided by others, including Adair. Both Kellahin and Adair were trying to answer the questions as honestly as they could, attempting to recall the situation as it was in July 1947. However, they are at odds with one another. There clearly is no way for Adair to be both in El Paso as he claimed and in Albuquerque as suggested by Kellahin.

Given the circumstances, there are some things that can be established. A number of newspaper articles about the events, written in 1947, have been reviewed. Although many of them had no by-line, they did carry an AP slug and did identify the location as Roswell. Since Kellahin was the only AP reporter there, assigned by the bureau chief in Albuquerque at the request of the AP headquarters in New York, it is clear that he wrote the articles.

The first problem encountered is Kellahin's memory of getting the call early in the morning. That simply doesn't track with the evidence. Walter Haut's press release was not issued until sometime after noon on July 8 and it didn’t go out on either the news wires until later. George Walsh of radio station KSWS remembered that Haut had telephoned the press release to him “about mid-day.” He copied the press release exactly, as Haut read it to him over the phone. Walsh, in turn called it into the Associated Press in Albuquerque. From there the release was put on the AP wire and that story was published in a number of newspapers.

There is a document, created in 1947, that provides the exact times for some of this. According The Daily Illini, the first of the stories on the Associated Press wire appeared at 4:26 p.m. on the east coast. That would mean that the stories went out from Albuquerque, sometime prior to 2:26 p.m.

That means there would be no reason for the AP to assign a reporter (Kellahin) on the morning of July 8. There was no story about the flying saucer until that afternoon. And, by the morning of July 9, the story was dead and no reason to send anyone to Roswell. The photos had already been taken of the debris in Fort Worth and the information about the nature of the debris had already released to the press. Besides, the story in the July 9 issue of The Roswell Daily Record makes it clear that they, Kellahin and Adair, had already arrived in Roswell, coming down on July 8.

Second is the story that Kellahin saw the weather balloon on the Brazel ranch. His description of the location, south of Vaughn but just off the main highway to Roswell is inaccurate (which is the advantage of having been there myself. I knew what the terrain looked like and how close, or far, it was from the highway.) The debris field, as identified by Bill Brazel and Bud Payne, is not close to the Vaughn - Roswell highway. In fact, the field where the debris was discovered is not visible from the roads around it. It is a cross country drive into a shallow valley.

More importantly, by the time Kellahin could have gotten to that field, the balloon should have been removed if it was just a balloon as described by Kellahin. In fact, according to Marcel and the newspaper articles, the balloon was already in Fort Worth if we believe what has been reported. After all, a balloon wouldn't have taken long to collect and Marcel had done that the day before.

Kellahin said in his affidavit that he had visited Brazel at the ranch house, met Brazel’s wife and young son. That is different from what he told me, and from the neighbors said and what Bill Brazel said. After meeting Brazel at the ranch house, they drove to the field where the debris was found.

Kellahin's testimony of seeing a balloon out in the field is intriguing, not because he is an eyewitness to the balloon on the crash site, but because of what it suggests. If there was a balloon, it would mean that the Army had to bring one in. In other words, they were salting the area, and that, in and of itself, would be important. It would suggest that the Army had something to hide, if they were planting evidence.

Given the sequencing of events, based on the newspaper accounts and other testimony, the earliest that Kellahin could have been in the field was late in the afternoon (around four or five p.m.) on July 8. However, by that time, Marcel and the special flight from Roswell were already in Fort Worth. If the balloon explanation is accurate, then the evidence had long since been collected and there would be nothing for Kellahin to see.

Kellahin also said there had been photographs taken while on that field. These photos, according to Kellahin had been transmitted from Roswell. The photo of Brazel transmitted, however, was one that had been taken, not in the field, but in the newspaper offices. If there were pictures taken in the field they have never been printed. Had they existed, even if of poor quality, they would have been printed. After all, what could be better than pictures of Mack Brazel with the debris in the field? Here was the most persuasive of evidence… Brazel, military officers, standing in the field with the remains of a balloon but apparently those pictures were never printed by any AP newspaper at any time.

By contrast, the seven pictures taken in Ramey's office were printed throughout the country. All seven have been located. Even the fairly rare picture of Irving Newton was printed in Texas newspapers and was used by the editors of Look when they printed their Flying Saucers special in 1966. But those that Kellahin claimed had been taken of Brazel on his ranch with the debris clearly displayed have never been found. That suggests that Kellahin's memory is flawed on this point.

The best evidence available is that Kellahin did not stop at the ranch on his way down to Roswell. He is mistaken about that. The lack of the photographs and evidence about the location of Brazel on the afternoon of July 8 suggest it. The location that Kellahin gives is in error though he does suggest in his affidavit that rather than stumbling upon the field, he was led to it by Brazel. The ranch was not close to Vaughn, and the debris field is not close to any road.

By the time Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell and were ready to begin reporting, some of the pressure was off. Ramey, in Fort Worth, explained that the material found in Roswell was nothing extraordinary. The FBI had issued a telex that suggested it was a balloon after discussing all this with Major Kirton in Fort Worth though it doesn’t seem the FBI bought the explanation. No longer was New York demanding pictures. In fact, several pictures had already been taken in Fort Worth.

The interview with Brazel occurred on the evening of July 8, according to the newspaper article in the July 9 edition of The Roswell Daily Record. Brazel was brought in by the owner of KGFL, Walt Whitmore, Sr. Brazel was then interviewed by Kellahin, as well as a reporter for the Roswell Daily Record. The pictures transmitted, those of Brazel and George Wilcox, are ones that had been taken in the office for that purpose. Kellahin wrote his story, which appeared in the newspapers the next day.

With the story dead, Kellahin was ordered to return to what he had been doing. He left Roswell. Kellahin believed that nothing extraordinary had been found and there was no reason for the events to stick in his mind.

The point here, however, is that if you accept any of the Kellahin testimony as fact and use it to bolster a theory, you are building on a shaky foundation. We can document who was doing what and where at the time and Kellahin’s story does not match any of that. Yes, he was in Roswell and yes, he did interview Brazel, but he didn’t see him at his ranch, there are no pictures of Brazel in that field, and the time line suggested by Kellahin is badly flawed.

Creating Memories

This one, I’m afraid, is for the skeptics in the crowd. It deals with memory, how it is formed, how it is recalled, and what it means to those of us who conduct investigations of long-ago events. The problem is that most of what we believe about memory is about to be radically altered, and if we pay attention to the on-going research into memory, it can only lead to better information gathered about long-ago events.

First, let me say that I have known for a long time that memory is often hazy and sometimes radically altered in the mere process of remembering. In The Abduction Enigma we looked at the phenomenon of “flash bulb” memory, that is, those memories formed around some sort of important event. The old standby was “where were you when you learned the president had been assassinated?” The thought was that this sort of a memory was “burned” into the brain with greater intensity than the mundane memories of day-to-day life and would be recalled with much better accuracy.

But, according to Professor Ulric Neisser, who was at Emory University in January 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, this might not be true. He had a rare opportunity to study these flash bulb memories because of the Challenger disaster. The day after the spacecraft blew-up, he presented his first-year students with a short questionnaire that dealt with what they were doing, where they were, and what they remembered. Three years later he gave them the same questionnaire but asked one additional question. He wanted to know how accurate they thought their memories were.

According to the results published by Neisser and his graduate assistant Nicole Harsh, one quarter of the students didn’t have any accurate memories of the event. In one case a student said that he had been with his parents when he learned of the disaster, but the questionnaire revealed he had been at school at the time.

More important was the reaction of the students when confronted with the discrepancies. None disputed the accuracy of the written documents but one student, when shown the questionnaire said, “I still remember everything happening the way I told you. I can’t help it.” She was defending her memories that were clearly an invention of her own mind.

The other 75% of the students remembered some, most, or all of it accurately. Twenty-five percent remembered the disaster accurately, so we can see that not all those involved were wrong and some can accurately recall the “stored” events. It would be interesting to see how they remembered the events today, after so many years have passed but that research has not been attempted.

I say all this as introduction to a new study that suggests memory is even more flawed than Neisser and Harsh suggested. According to an online article in Wired (March 2012) by Jonah Lehrer entitled The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories, and available at:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/

memory erodes very quickly. Lehrer wrote:

Consider the study of flashbulb memories, extremely vivid, detailed recollections. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps surveyed several hundred subjects about their memories of that awful day. The scientists then repeated the surveys, tracking how the stories steadily decayed. At one year out, 37 percent of the details had changed. By 2004 that number was approaching 50 percent. Some changes were innocuous—the stories got tighter and the narratives more coherent—but other adjustments involved a wholesale retrofit. Some people even altered where they were when the towers fell. Over and over, the act of repeating the narrative seemed to corrupt its content. The scientists aren’t sure about this mechanism, and they have yet to analyze the data from the entire 10-year survey. But Phelps expects it to reveal that many details will be make-believe. “What’s most troubling, of course, is that these people have no idea their memories have changed this much,” she says. “The strength of the emotion makes them convinced it’s all true, even when it’s clearly not.”

Lehrer noted that most of what we thought we knew about memory going back to the ancient Greeks is in error. Lehrer wrote, “Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.”

But, according to the research, this is all untrue. In studying memory, and the way it is stored in the brain, it seems that the memory evolves as it is accessed. Each time someone remembers something, it can be subtly altered. New information might be included, old information edited out, and anything that a person has heard about an event can be incorporated in the memory.

An example of this Lydia Sleppy, the teletype operator (well, secretary at a New Mexico radio station KOAT in 1947) who was typing the story of the UFO crash as told to her by Johnny McBoyle. According to an article by Bobbi Ann Slate and Stan Friedman in the Winter 1974 issue of Saga’s UFO Report, “As the woman began typing out the fantastic news item over the teletype to their other two radio stations, a line appeared in the middle of her text, tapped in from somewhere, with the official order: ‘Do not continue this transmission!’”

In The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, the statement was, “Attention Albuquerque: Do not transmit. Repeat do not transmit this message. Stop communication immediately.”

She told me, in a February 1993 interview, “I don’t know how much I had typed but I was typing what John [McBoyle] dictated when the signal came on that this was the FBI and we were to cease transmitting.”

In her signed affidavit of September 1993, she said, “This is the FBI. You will immediately cease all communication.”

While it can be seen here that she clearly added the FBI to her story, what we don’t know is how it was introduced. It could be it was something that she remembered, or it could be that someone, asking about that communication wondered if it might not have been the FBI, and she incorporated the FBI into her memory. Clearly the memory has changed from the time it was first told and reported in 1974, until she talked to me and signed the affidavit nearly twenty years later.

What all this new research says to me is that memories, no more than a year old can be badly flawed. Memories that are accessed time and again, as most of those for the various “Roswell” witnesses have been, could easily be altered as they come into contact with new information.

Jason Kellahin, who was a reporter in 1947, told me, that they had been alerted to the UFO crash story in the morning and drove to the Foster ranch. Brazel, his wife and young son were there. Brazel took Kellahin and Robin Adair, the photographer into the field.

There is nothing in the record, anywhere, to suggest that Brazel was in the field with a balloon to be photographed and when Kellahin was in that field, Brazel was already in Roswell, in the hands of the military. These facts can all be documented by various newspaper accounts and the testimony of nearly everyone else interviewed.

Nearly everything that Kellahin told me was wrong and I know this, not because he was reinforcing the balloon explanation, but because the facts, established through documentation from the time, prove that his story is untrue… but I should be clear on this, I didn’t say he was lying. He seemed to have believed everything he was saying, it was just contradicted by documentation.

And that is the key here. How do we determine what is an accurate picture of the events of July 1947 and what is a combination of confabulation (that is, an unconscious filling in of details of a story) and memory reconsolidation which is the way memory is recreated in the brain?

The answer is use the documentation available to corroborate the stories, use the testimony of others who were involved as a way of testing the veracity of a story, and cross check the information with what the witness has said before.

This new information, from Wired, is a cautionary tale for us. While we know that many of the witnesses were telling the truth, as they remember it, we must be aware that they might not remember it correctly. This complicates the task of putting together an accurate history of the Roswell case, but it also provides us with information that will be helpful in determining what the truth is.