Stan Friedman vs. Philip Klass - What's the Difference?

 When Stan Friedman died, I had thought that it was inappropriate to mention many of the stunts that he had pulled during his UFO career. I thought that I might do something later, but as time passed, it seemed that the motivation had passed. Besides, he was no longer here to attempt to explain his actions, so I just never got around to writing anything about it.

All that changed when I listened to Richard Dolan and Kathleen Marden trash Philip

Philip Klass

Klass with rumors and half-truths. It stuck me that nearly everything they were saying about Klass could be said about Friedman with the exception of the wild claim that Klass had been a Soviet asset… which has become something of the go to position when assassinating someone’s character in the world today. Accuse them of collusion with the Russians.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Philip Klass had pulled some fairly dirty tricks in his Ufological career. I did a long post about this a number of years ago when challenged to provide proof of my claim about that. You can read that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/12/philip-klass-and-fbi.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/09/philip-klass-and-his-letter-writing.html

In the interest of full disclosure, I did know Klass on a personal level. While I was attending a DIA school in Washington, D.C., Klass took me sailing on the Potomac River. I visited him at his home, and over the years we had shared the dinner table several times. I had a long correspondence with him as well. The last time I saw him was in St. Louis in 2000 at the MUFON Symposium. He asked me to help him to his room. At that time, his health had deteriorated to the point it was difficult for him to get around.

This is, however, about Stan Friedman. I had known him for thirty years and if I remember correctly, first met him while in Roswell to tape a segment for Unsolved Mysteries. We had a number of conversations and even shared a meal or two. There

Stan Friedman

was no air of competition then. That would come later.

The animosity probably began when we met, along with Don Schmitt, in Illinois. I had approached Avon Books with a proposal to write a book about the Roswell case. An offer had been extended and it wasn’t much of a secret. Friedman suggested that we all work together. His name would go last on the book, he would receive a quarter of the money, and would provide assistance with witnesses.

We, meaning Don and I, had already had a taste of that assistance. Don had been attempting to find Bill Rickett of the Roswell CIC office. Friedman said not to bother because Rickett had died. Don did locate a telephone number and was talking to Mary Rickett, asking her questions, when she interrupted and asked, “Would you like to talk to Bill. He’s sitting right here.”

There are other examples of this, but they are really about trivia. Instead, let’s move onto other, more important issues. After we decided, that is Don and me, that we wouldn’t accept Friedman’s offer, he chose a different path. He sent to the publisher, Avon Books, and our editor, John Douglas, a letter dated June 11, 1990. There were a number of allegations in the letter. Friedman wrote:

I have been to Roswell twice in the past year and perhaps unfortunately have shared some of my recent research with Randle and Schmitt. As [Bill] Moore would have told you there was talk of a book by him, Myself and Jaime Shandera updating the Roswell story…

As you can tell from the enclosed paper I was not happy with the Roswell Incident because of the inappropriate material that was included, the misquotation of myself, and the absence of the contractually obligated acknowledgement of my major contribution. I am certainly anxious to see the Randle Schmitt book to see if once again my contribution is undervalued and if there are many factual mistakes, flights of fancy, lifting of my research much of which remains unpublished. I think the story needs to be told, but with full credit for my and other investigations… After all, by the end of 1985, Moore and I had located 92 persons connected with the event. It is difficult to believe that S and R didn’t depend strongly on that base for their book…

Anxiously awaiting a copy of the manuscript for review only.

Friedman letter to John Douglas

There are two points that need to be made. First, I spent nearly 24 hours on the telephone with the publisher’s lawyers, explaining how, where and when, we interviewed the witnesses. Finally, one of the lawyers asked if I had tapes and I said, “Both audio and video.” That ended the problem.

But remember how Friedman complained, “I am certainly anxious to see the Randle Schmitt book to see if once again my contribution is undervalued and if there are many factual mistakes, flights of fancy, lifting of my research much of which remains unpublished.”

This is exactly what he did in his book, Crash at Corona. There is a long quote from Bill Brazel, describing what his father, Mack Brazel, told him about finding the crashed object, and then a longer section that described what Bill had seen and found. The descriptions are on pages 84 – 85 of the original hardback edition of that book. This information came from an interview conducted by Don and me, at the Outpost in Carrizozo, New Mexico, on February 19, 1989. There is no reference to of our Brazel interview found in that book. It was lifted without permission or acknowledgement and is blatant plagiarism.

Left to right, Kevin Randle, Bill Brazel and Don Schmitt at the Outpost in Carizozo.

To make it worse, Friedman altered the interview by inserting a word into Brazel’s description of the four military men who came to see him. To make the testimony conform to that given by Gerald Anderson, Friedman put in the bracketed word “black” because Anderson told Friedman about a black sergeant who chased them off the crash site on the Plains of San Agustin.

Then, to explain this insertion, he claimed that Brazel had used a racially charged word to describe the sergeant. Bill Brazel, however, never had identified any of the soldiers as black. In a 1992 interview, when I asked him specially about this, Brazel said that none of them were black. Friedman had changed the testimony to suit his own beliefs and then lied about the reason for that change. You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

Friedman, of course, backpedaled on his claims about our book once he received a letter from my agent’s attorney. In the July 30, 1990, letter, Friedman pointed out, “I did not allege plagiarism or infringement of copyright… I have had a number of friendly discussions with Kevin and Don concerning the book and am quite satisfied that my rights are not violated.” (Please note here that we are now Kevin and Don rather than Randle and Schmitt.)

That is far from the only example of Friedman taking our research without credit or attribution in his book; only the largest and most obvious. He quotes from Marian Strickland, a neighbor of Mack Brazel, about his treatment while a “guest” of the Army. Again, the information came from Don and me without credit nor attribution. We interviewed her in January 1990 and again in September 1990. We also took Don Berliner to meet with her but Friedman fails to mention it.

This all came to a head in 1993 when Dick Hall, of the Fund for UFO Research, got involved. He asked for evidence of my allegations and published his results in the May/June 1993 issue of the International UFO Report. He wrote:

Randle alleged that Friedman and others, apparently acting in concert, had attempted to interfere with the publication of the book UFO Crash at Roswell (then in preparation) by contacting the publisher, Avon Books, making charges of plagiarism and generally impugning Randle’s character and integrity. I asked Randle for documentation, which he provided. I asked Friedman for an explanation, and he never replied…

Other repeated ad hominem attacks shall go unmentioned. The concerted effort to derail the Randle/Schmitt book is indefensible.

Friedman and the Lecture Circuit

There is another aspect to all this as well. I had been invited to make a presentation in Cincinnati in the early 1990s. The hosts told me on the morning of the presentation that Friedman had called them, asking why they had invited me. He said to them, “Didn’t you want a scientist?”

I said that they should have said, “Sure. Do you know one?”

But there was really no way to change things around at that late date, even if Friedman had been successful in his attempt to get them to cancel my presentation. It hints at a larger problem.

Now, it can be said that I can’t prove this little interchange took place and that is true. The main host died a number of years ago. However, I’m not the only one who has had this problem. I have a letter, provided by Robert Hastings, who is well-known on the UFO lecture circuit and as the author of UFOs and Nukes. In a letter dated July 25, 1989, John J. Romero, Jr., Hasting’s attorney, wrote:

This letter shall acknowledge receipt of your [Friedman’s] correspondence dated May 26, 1989. In your letter, you state that you have not accused Mr. Hastings of fraud and that you have not defamed him. You further stated that you have “no intention of defaming him in the future…

In your letter of May 26, you suggest that our concern may be without merit. Please be advised that our position is based on the written statement of Ms. Karyl Kumer, Director of Student Support Services of Central Florida Community College. In her statement, Ms. Kumer unequivocally reports that you had previously informed her that Robert Hastings did not know what he was talking about, that he did not have the “real facts” and that “he was just another fraud.”

Ms. Kumer is prepared to sign an Affidavit, under oath, concerning the substance of that particular conversation.

Letter to Friedman documenting Friedman had lied about Hastings.

And to show that this was an on-going campaign by Friedman to take others off the lecture circuit there is a letter dated August 1^st, 1992 (A.D,) in which Jim Mosely wrote:

Re Friedman – I can only tell you, as I would tell anyone who asks, about my own experience with Uncle Stan: Back in 1966, the “marsh gas” flap in Michigan indirectly propelled me to stardom in the UFO field, and I ended up lecturing to over 100 colleges around the country, on the lucrative college circuit. Then, around 1970, Stan started to appear on the circuit. He was indeed better qualified than I was and I was getting tired of the thing anyhow – so I didn’t mind being squeezed out – BUT I did mind his method: Several colleges told me that after I was already booked, he would call more than once and plead that they cancel me and put him on instead. Dirty pool, I say. When I finally dropped off the college circuit in 1974, Stan once said to me on the phone, “I don’t have to think of you as a rival any more.”

Letter from Moseley documenting that Friedman attempted to get Moseley's bookings cancelled.

The Gerald Anderson Fiasco

Those of you who have visited here, or read any number of my books on the Roswell case, know that Don and I never accepted the Gerald Anderson tale of seeing a crashed saucer on the Plains of San Agustin. We had caught Gerald Anderson, one of Friedman’s primary witnesses, in a number of lies, changes of his testimony, and one of those flights of fancy that Friedman had been so worried about.

I was the first to interview Anderson when he returned my telephone call and because he claimed to be a first-hand witness to both the craft and the bodies, he could be important. That he was five at the time of the crash was problematic, and that he claimed the object crashed on the Plains was another worrisome fact. Almost as soon as I had gotten off the telephone, I sent an email to Friedman about Anderson and his claims. Because of what Anderson had told me, I knew that Friedman would want to know about it. This just proves that cooperation with Stan was always a one-way street. I’d send him information but never got any of it back.

Friedman, in his first telephone conversation with Anderson, told him not work with me, that I was former Air Force intelligence and that I wrote romances. He said to just work with him, cutting me out of the conversations and the investigations. In fact, according to Anderson, we’d only spoken for 26 minutes and the conversation wasn’t all that friendly, so this wasn’t a problem for him. I countered the claim saying that my tape of the interview ran to more than 50 minutes and was, in fact, quite friendly.

John Carpenter, brought in by Friedman to conduct part of the Anderson investigation, suggested that my tape was running slow. To prove the point, Carpenter sent me a copy of Anderson’s telephone bill showing a call lasting only 26 minutes. This was one of the biggest mistakes that Anderson made during his UFO period.

Friedman, of course, attacked me for calling Anderson a liar and suggested that I was nothing more than an anti-abduction propagandist. I’m not sure what my opinions on alien abduction had to do with the case at hand, but I suppose any mud that you can sling is better than no mud at all.

Because my telephone number was on the telephone bill, I took it to Southwestern Bell, and asked if they could validate it. Becky Pim provided a copy of the bill from their records. It did not match the one that Anderson had created. It verified what I had been saying about the length of the call. Anderson had forged the telephone bill. Eventually he admitted this when confronted by Carpenter and the evidence I had provided. This was all laid out in the September 1992, issue of the International UFO Reporter. See also John Carpenter’s article, “Gerald Anderson: Disturbing Revelations,” in the March 1993, MUFON UFO Journal.

Even though Anderson had admitted the truth, Friedman continued to support him, suggesting that Anderson had created the phone bill to make me look bad because of what I had said about him. This was an attempt to blame me for Anderson’s bad act. It was because, frankly, I was telling the truth about him and Anderson didn’t like it.

This led, however, to a much more important point. Anderson had identified the archaeologists that were supposed to have been on the Plains on that day in 1947. Anderson said the leader was Adrian Buskirk. Tom Carey, who holds an advanced degree in Anthropology, set out to find Buskirk. He found a Winfred Buskirk, who held an advanced degree in Anthropology. Using an “identi-kit” sketch of Buskirk provided by Anderson, it was clear that Winfred Buskirk was Adrian Buskirk. The problem was that Buskirk, in 1947, was not on the Plains of San Agustin but in Arizona conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation.

The question was, if Anderson didn’t see Buskirk on the Plains, then how could he identify him as an Anthropologist. Buskirk, it turned out, had taught high school in Albuquerque in 1957, when Anderson was a high school student. Anderson attended that same high school, and, according to Buskirk, had taken his Anthropology course. That was the connection.

Buskirk had been as curious as we were about the connection and called friends in Albuquerque who were able to check Anderson’s high school transcripts. Although Buskirk didn’t remember Anderson, the transcripts proved the connection. Anderson, according to the documentation, had taken the Anthropology course. We’d not only put Anderson in the same high school as Buskirk, we’d put him in the same classroom.

Buskirk provided the names of several officials in case I wanted to verify the information about Anderson taking his, Buskirk’s Anthropology class, which was the only Anthropology course offered. I talked with those officials, who were looking at the transcripts as I spoke with them on the telephone. Anderson had taken the Anthropology class. Anderson, of course, denied this and produced a Xerox of his high school transcript, but it looked as if it had been modified, just as he had done with the telephone bill. It was another example of Anderson forging a document.

While you could say that Friedman was just supporting a witness whose story he believed, it is actually much worse. Friedman knew the truth about Anderson and his faked tale of being on the Plains with Dr. Buskirk. But Friedman wanted to preserve the story because it supported his theory of a collision between two saucers with one crashing near Roswell and the other falling on the Plains.

In a letter dated 19 August 1991, and apparently written at 9:00 a.m. Buskirk provided the last bit of evidence proving this. He wrote:

Mrs. Robert Klicker just called me from Albuquerque. She had received a call from Jim Hulsman, who had checked the school records for us. (Apparently Dr. [sic] Friedman had previously made inquiries of Hulsman).

Anderson had called Hulsman to tell him that he did not want Hulsman or the school to divulge any information about him. The conversation was, apparently, friendly, but Hulsman felt he, and perhaps Mrs. Klicker too, had been threatened with a possible law suit.

So, while Friedman was calling me names and defending Anderson as a credible source, he knew the truth. Anderson had identified his high school Anthropology instructor as the man on the Plains, regardless of the evidence against that claim.

Buskirk letter showing Friedman knew the truth about Anderson.

To make this worse, in a June 20, 1991, letter to George Eberhart, Friedman wrote, “(it) is probably right that Winfred Buskirk is the man in the Indentikit sketch… who would therefore be lying about where he was in July 1947. Coincidence???” Note that Friedman is quick to label Buskirk a liar without a shred of evidence that Buskirk was in New Mexico or lying. All the available documentation places him in Arizona on the critical days in 1947.

Tom Carey (left) and Stan Friedman in Roswell.

Tom Carey took some flak for his role in exposing the truth about Anderson. In a letter dated August 3, 1992, Dick Hall wrote:

I also have to say that your paper titled “Propagandist of the Year” (1/19/92), in which you call Thomas J. Carey a propagandist and make other insinuations, is just the sort of accusatory, unscientific, and unprofessional paper that is doing so much harm. Of course, many of your arguments are cogent, and important to anyone trying to obtain a clear picture, but the tone is insulting and the tactics – propagandistic! The cogency of some of your arguments gets lost in the gratuitous personal put-downs. And there is irony in your accusation that CUFOS engages in ad hominem attacks. You must have a very foggy mirror.

I have now read the CUFOS-FUFOR conference paper, and I have to say that Gerald Anderson’s credibility is severely damaged thereby (not by ad hominem attacks but by documented facts), and also your and Don’s [Berliner] integrity if the CUFOS remarks about your failing to live of up to the terms of the conference are accurate.

For those who wish to delve into this episode a little more deeply and see the manipulation of the data about Anderson, including Anderson’s lie about being a Navy SEAL see:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/anderson.htm

Brigadier General Arthur Exon

There are almost endless examples of Friedman’s attacks, but there is space for one more. Brigadier General Arthur Exon had been the base commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1960s. He had inside knowledge on some of the

BG Arthur Exon

workings of the official UFO investigation, and provided information about it. That information was in conflict with Friedman’s belief in the mythical MJ-12. Since what Exon said tended to discredit MJ-12, that could not be tolerated by Friedman. To fix this, Friedman said that he had called Exon after the publication of UFO Crash at Roswell, read him the sections attributed to him, and then began saying that we had misquoted Exon.

I wrote to Friedman and told him we had the quotes on tape. He might not like the quotes but there were accurate. Friedman responded on October 31, 1991, writing:

I will continue to say you misquoted Exon since that is what he told me. After all the misrepresentations about what Anderson said both in your transcription and in your article, even misquoting you own transcription [another allegation that is unproved], as pointed out by John Carpenter, why should I believe anything you say about what you have on tape?

I sent a copy of the book and a copy of the tape to Exon. On November 24, 1991, he responded. He wrote:

I’m sorry that a portion of my interview has given you trouble. I will acknowledge that the quick quotes does have me saying that my flights later, much later verified the direction of possible flight of the object…

Although I believe you did quote me accurately, I do believe that in your writings you gave more credence and impression of personal and direct knowledge that my recordings would indication [sic] their own!

Exon letter confirming the accuracy of the quotes.

This is much longer than I intended and seems to have focused on the early 1990s. I have other letters, other quotes that are in the same vein. Allegations that he has invented, sometimes out of whole cloth. In the 1995 MUFON Symposium Proceedings, Friedman published “38 False Claims by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt.” Eventually, I inherited them all because Don’s name was later dropped.

As but a single example of this Friedman wrote, “That S. T. Friedman knew all about an RS [Randle/Schmitt] alien tissue sample.”

To this day, I don’t know what that means and I never said anything of the kind. Friedman made this up.

The point here is that nearly everything said by Dolan and Marden in their discussion about Philip Klass can be said about Friedman. Both Klass and Friedman used the same tactics, wrote the same sort of letters, and accused those with whom they disagreed of nefarious ideas and deeds. (Klass, said that we were anti-American for challenging the government and, ironically Friedman accused us, at one point, of being government agents.) Friedman, at his lectures, often pointed out that I was only in it for the money and I as a fiction writer I could create imaginative scenarios.

I suppose that we all should now hold up to close scrutiny Friedman’s claims of MJ-12, a crash on the Plains of San Agustin, and his support of other crash stories. If he would manipulate the data as we’ve seen here, if he would attempt to silence the voices of those who disagreed with him, and if would change testimony of the witnesses to bolster his claims, what else might he have done to promote himself and denigrate others? How valuable is his research given all this?

Jim Moseley is Dead

James W. Moseley, who for decades has poked and prodded the world of UFOs, died Friday in Florida. He was 81.

Moseley is best known as the editor of Saucer Smear, the final evolution of his self-published newsletters that were sent on an irregular schedule to his “non-subscribers.” In its pages he printed his opinions which were sometimes radical and sometimes rational. He welcomed responses, often soliciting them to keep the controversies going.

James W. Moseley, J. S.

He was the son of an Army general, whom he seemed to dislike and a self-described grave robber, trading in antiquities from South America. He faked, according to his book, Shockingly Close to the Truth, written with the late Karl Pflock, a UFO landing, and the a letter supposedly from the Department of State to contactee George Adamski. In other words, he often had fun with those in the world of UFOs which might have been his ultimate mission.

In later life he moved from the idea that UFOs might be Earth-based craft to an opinion that they were more terrestrially based (or as Jerry Clark pointed out to me, extra-dimensional, which is not necessarily terrestrially based). But that didn’t stop him from keeping his fingers in the UFO pie.

Mosley lived, for the last many years in Key West, Florida, where he avoided the Internet as much as possible, and enjoyed his position in the world of UFOs. He died of cancer on November 16.

Jim Moseley, Saucer Smear and Me Part 2

Jim Moseley was annoyed at me for the recent posting I made and sent me a note correcting me about who had the oldest continuingly published 'zine. I that thought there was a British magazine that pre-dated Moseley and I was, of course, right about that.

Moseley has now sent me a note dated sometime after December 12, 2008, from Denis Plunkett that said, "Thank you for your letter of December 12th, 2008, which was welcome. Regarding your letter, I am pleased to inform you that, as we no longer publish a magazine, you therefore have the deserved title of 'the oldest UFO publication in the world.' Wishing you all the best for the New Year and beyond..."

So, you all now know that Moseley has the oldest publication, but he only recently gained the title.

Thought I would set the recrod straight and I'm sure someone will pass this along to him in the next few weeks.

Saucer Smear, Jim Moseley and Me

Jim Moseley of Saucer Smear (the second oldest continuously published UFO "zine" if you count its various incarnations and seen below with a drawing of Moseley) and I have been in a bit of a dust-up about Jesse Marcel, Sr. and the champion of the Mogul theory, Charles Moore.

The latest started when I suggested that Moore, based on the documentation available, had been told Mogul’s name long before Robert Todd arrived in 1992 to tell him. The point had been that Mogul was so secret that even those who worked on it had not known the name until more than forty years had passed. Documentation, from the Air Force showed Dr. Albert Crary, the project leader had known the name in 1946 and had mentioned it in his unclassified diary a couple of times... a clear security violation unless, of course, the name wasn’t classified as we had been told.

In a letter dated in 1949, Moore was introduced to James A. van Allen as one of the Project Mogul engineers. This letter, too, was unclassified and another security violation if the name had been classified. And, importantly, it came from Moore’s files, proving that he had known the name before Todd told him.

Now before we go farther, let me point out that I believe that Moore had forgotten the name when he told researchers he hadn’t known it until Todd told him, and there was nothing more nefarious in his claim than that. However, we can no longer say that Mogul was so secret that even those working on it didn’t know the name. Clearly, based on the documentation, they did.

I pointed all this out to Jim Moseley and asked him if we didn’t label Moore a liar for his mistake, shouldn’t we grant the same courtesy to Marcel? Rather than answer that question, Moseley sent me copies of articles that were more than a decade old and in which these same mistakes about the secrecy of Mogul were repeated. He also sent articles, more than a decade old in which Marcel is characterized as a liar and far worse, though his offenses seem to be no worse than those committed by Moore. Clearly all this information was outdated.

So, let’s look at some of these criticisms. Marcel told Bob Pratt, then of the National Enquirer that he had flown as a pilot, bombardier and waist gunner while in the service. Todd, and by extension Moseley, suggests that this proves that Marcel was less than candid when he was interviewed based on what Todd found when reviewing Marcel’s service record. There was nothing there to indicate that Marcel had flown in those positions.

But I believe the wording in Marcel’s statement is crucial and has been overlooked. Marcel said he had flown AS a pilot, bombardier and waist gunner, not that he served in any of those positions in any official capacity. For those who have never been in an aviation unit, Marcel’s claim isn’t that farfetched.

Those who have no rating, meaning they are not on flight status, are often provided with an opportunity to fly in aviation positions. I have flown as a helicopter door gunner, but you’ll find nothing in my record to support that. And, I have given "stick time" to door gunners and crew chiefs but you’ll find nothing in their records to reflect that. The point is that all of us can say, truthfully, that we flew in those positions.

Todd, and by extension Moseley, also make a big deal out of Marcel’s claim to have been a private pilot because there was no record of a license with the FAA. This is true because I asked the FAA about it and although their records do go back into the 1920s, when Marcel would have started flying and the government began to attempt to license pilots, this really isn’t the whole story.

If you check out the FAA site and take a look at the licensing history, you’ll learn, as did I, that in the 1920s the forerunner to the FAA tried to induce private pilots to voluntarily get licenses without much success. It wasn’t until the mid-1930s that most pilots were finally licensed and it wasn’t until after the Second World War that there was a real requirement for a license. Even with that many who had started flying in biplanes didn’t bother with the licenses. It could be argued here that Marcel, having no need to fly any more, simply didn’t bother. Before the war he had been a cartographer with Shell Oil but after the war and after he left the Army his interest shifted to electronics and any interest he had in aviation ended.

What this suggests to me is that much of what Todd claimed about Marcel simply is unimportant. It proves nothing about Marcel’s veracity. Everything Marcel said could be true and the lack of documentation in the military files is simply irrelevant given the many circumstances surrounding the creation of military records. Just ask about any veteran if his or her records are accurate and you’ll learn that few are.

We can conclude then that the discrepancies between what Marcel told Pratt and what is found in the military are not necessarily the result of LIES told by Marcel. It is clear from the record that Marcel did fly on military missions and was awarded the Air Medal twice, and for those of you keeping score at home, the only way to be awarded an Air Medal is to participate in aerial flight (which is what the regulation says... aerial flight, as if there is another kind, but I digress...)

Now, if we want to be completely fair in this brief analysis, we have to look at one other aspect of the Pratt interview. According to what Pratt wrote in his transcript, Marcel, Sr. said, "I was working for Shell Oil Co [note, I’m going to reproduce this as closely to the transcript as I can rather than use Karl Pflock’s cleaned up interpretation] as a photographer when the war began. all my map making for the engineers and Shell oil co was derived from aerial photographs... no degree then. got one later, 6 diff schools..."

Later in that same Pratt interview, Marcel said, "...degree in nuclear physics (bachelors) at completed work at GW Univ inWash. attended (LSU, Houston, U of Wis, NY Univ, Ohio State , Docotr pool? [In Pflock’s cleaned up version, that last part is marked as unintelligible and while it doesn’t make sense, it certainly is relevant to our discussion] and GW..."

So, what do we know. Well, Todd and others make a big deal that Marcel’s military record showed only a year and a half at LSU. There seems to be no dispute with that. Could it be that Marcel received his degree after his military service? Could it also mean that while in the service he took extension courses offered to members of the service by various universities, often with the classes taught on the bases?

Here’s all we really know about this. GW has no record of a degree being issued to Jesse Marcel but then Marcel didn’t really say that in the interview. Marcel was assigned to the Washington, D.C. area after his service in Roswell so it’s not impossible for him to have attended extension courses, which we might now call distance learning, while there and I have been unable to learn if GW offered any such classes and who would have kept the records of them. I suspect that the wrong questions were asked, so I’m now trying to find these answers which I’ll report on when I get them.

The fact that Marcel’s military record contains nothing about this could be irrelevant. If the schooling was taken after his military service, then it wouldn’t be in there. My Army records show that I have a high school diploma and little else. The Air Force required me, after several years of service, to prove I had a bachelor’s degree even though the source of my commission was ROTC and the only way to receive a commission that way was to have graduated from an accredited college or university. Just one more example of how fragmented these records sometimes are.

After all these years, it seems to me that a new set of questions needs to be asked about Marcel’s college career. I don’t believe the right questions were asked originally so now we have to go back and do it again. Those claiming that Marcel lied about his college education might have been so caught up in proving Marcel a liar that they ran with the first negative results they received. Maybe a little digging will resolve this.

I’m going mention one other thing here. Todd, in his publication The KowPflop Quarterly, suggested that he had asked Jesse Marcel, Jr. about some of the discrepancies with what his father had said. In a quite reasonable conclusion, Todd wrote, "Marcel hasn’t even acknowledged my letter, much less furnished an explanation for this rather significant discrepancy."

But Todd’s letters to Marcel, Jr. were certainly not reasonable. Todd, as was his habit, turned nasty in his communications with those who didn’t agree with him. In a letter to another researcher, Todd wrote, "I have already been told that he [Friedman] and Randle both have been slandering me at every opportunity. Apparently these two shameless liars..." and this is one of his less inflammatory statements.

About Jesse Marcel, Jr., he wrote, "It should be noted that Jesse Marcel, Jr., now conveniently claims his father told him he had some ‘bootleg’ flying time which presumably wasn’t documented [which, of course, is the definition of bootleg time]... Given Major Marcel’s numerous other lies, and the younger Marcel’s obvious and understandable desire to salvage his father’s credibility, there is no reason to take the younger Marcel’s claim seriously."

You might say this is still fairly tame, though he does manage to call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar and suggest that Jesse Jr. is lying as well.

But then we have a May 10, 1996 letter from Todd that begins, "Dear Junior," meaning Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr. Not exactly the kind of salutation you put on a reasonable letter to a physician.

Todd then wrote, "The spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors in your ‘960420' letter didn’t surprise me, given the level of ‘intelligence’ you’ve demonstrated in the past. The disgraceful obscenities didn’t surprise me either, given the scum with whom you’re known to associate. Likewise, the fact that you actually bothered to send me a letter, telling me that your letters are a waste to me, is a clear demonstration of the cutting edge ‘logic’ I’ve come to expect from the hysterical little girl who has come to be know as ‘the alien spaceship doctor.’"

I will note two things about the above. It explains why Todd didn’t get responses to some of his letters, and on this one, Jesse Marcel, Jr. wrote, "I did not send a letter with this date [960420 which I suppose it Todd’s convoluted dating system for April 4, 1996] to him."

Todd was often nasty, didn’t believe anyone had the analytically ability that he did and believed all his conclusions to always be right. There was no room for disagreement in his world.

I mention all this, because it was Todd who worked so hard to destroy the reputation of Jesse Marcel, Sr. believing, I guess, that if Marcel crumbled, then the whole of the Roswell case crumbled. Had Marcel been the lone voice, that would have been true, but Marcel was backed up by every officer on Colonel Blanchard’s 509th Bomb Group staff with a single exception. Marcel had lots of company.

Moseley, who knows most of this about Todd, still believes the Mogul balloon story despite mounting evidence to the contrary and Moseley still believes that Todd contributed something to the case with his release of Marcel’s entire military file. But Todd drew conclusions from the slightest information and proved time and again that he had no knowledge of how the military worked. Moseley has almost none himself, despite the fact that his father had been a major general and one time the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army (when major generals held that post).

Moseley clings to the ridiculous Project Mogul answer for the Roswell case while many others admit now that Mogul is not the answer. But the real point here is that Moseley still believes that Marcel lied to Pratt when the evidence isn’t as cut and dried as he thinks it is. He relies on what Karl Pflock wrote about Marcel and Pflock relied on Todd and Todd simply didn’t understand how the military works. Todd believed that everything in the record was totally accurate and when it disagreed with what a witness said, then the witness must have been lying.

I have sent Moseley another letter asking him the same question again. If we grant Charles Moore the benefit of the doubt when the records clearly show them in conflict with his testimony, then don’t we owe the same courtesy to Jesse Marcel, Sr.? All of these discrepancies are over relatively minor points and can be explained by the fog of time and the frailty of memory.

I still await his answer.