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 Clearly all this information was outdated.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.

Jesse Marcel Conundrum

I knew the “This and That” post would draw some interesting responses, but I didn’t see it moving into the arena it has. Some of the questions being asked are quite insightful and I have some of the answers. For those answers I don’t have, David Rudiak will probably provide some additional commentary to help us understand the situation.

According to Stan Friedman, he was in Baton Rouge on February 20, 1978, when one of the directors of a television station told Friedman he should talk to Jesse Marcel. Marcel said that he had handled pieces of a flying saucer, and though Friedman said he was dubious, he took down Marcel’s name and using directory assistance (does that still exist?) was given Marcel’s telephone number. At the airport with some time to spare, he called Marcel. According to Friedman, Marcel related to him, during that telephone conversation, the details of the crash, though Marcel couldn’t remember the date. He knew it was Roswell where it happened.

According to Friedman’s book, Crash at Corona, it seems Marcel had already

Jesse Marcel

formed the idea that the debris was left by something alien. Friedman quotes indirectly from Marcel (which means it is Friedman telling us what Marcel said), but I don’t know if the quotes came from that first conversation or if in writing the book and knowing the full story in the 1990s that he recreated the quotes from other, later interviews. Since this was a telephone interview using an airport telephone, I suspect there is no tape.

On April 7, 1978, according to Len Stringfield, he linked a Chicago reporter, Steve Tom (I use the term reporter though Stringfield actually identified him as an NBC radio newsman) to Jesse Marcel at his home in Houma, LA. Marcel again talked about the event, the strange material. According to Stringfield, Marcel said that when the press learned about the retrieval operation and “To get them off my back, I told them we were recovering a downed weather balloon.”

In his Status Report Number II, Stringfield wrote, “Since the Major’s story got publicity, it has been said by some researchers that the retrieved fragments were possibly part of the Skyhook balloon, at that time classified as Secret. On October 5, 1979, I called him and got this comment:

The material I gathered did not resemble anything off a balloon. A balloon, of any kind could not have exploded and spread its debris over a broad area… I was later told that a military team from my base was sent to rake the entire area.

I don’t know if Stringfield recorded any of these conversations with Marcel. After Stringfield died, his files were donated to MUFON which restricts access to them (and most of their other material). Those in the Chicago area might try to find a recording of Marcel on the NBC affiliate there in 1978, though I suspect Mark Rodeghier, who found the “Headline Edition” from ABC probably already checked on that.

Bob Pratt interviewed Marcel on December 8, 1979. I have posted the exact transcript of that interview to this blog at:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/jesse-marcel-sr-bob-pratt-and-interview.html

Karl Pflock published a cleaned up version of this in his book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. As I have noted, in his cleaned up version, some of the problems with the Pratt interview were, well, cleaned up. In one place the insertion of a comma changes the meaning of the sentence.

There is another point that raises questions and it surfaces in both the transcript and the article that Pratt wrote. According to that article:

Wreckage from the UFO “was scattered as far as you could see,” revealed Marcel who was awarded five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft on bombers in World War 2. [What a bizarre sentence from a professional writer.]

As we all know, Marcel was awarded two Air Medals for combat missions during that war. There are no indications that he shot down any enemy aircraft and I don’t know if the error was one of Pratt’s misunderstanding what Marcel said, or if it was a claim made by Marcel. I did ask Pratt if he had retained the tape recording but he told me that once the story had been published, they reused the tapes… It just shows that you never know what is going to become important.

Here’s what I do know at this point. The first Friedman interview was by telephone while Friedman was at the airport. Marcel didn’t say anything about the photographs and while in today’s world, if Friedman had photographs, he could have shown them to Marcel using the Internet, in 1978, that capability just didn’t exist. Besides, Marcel wasn’t sure of the date and it was Bill Moore who finally found the newspaper articles that included pictures of Marcel so Friedman didn’t have the pictures then and didn’t know they existed.

The subsequent Moore/Friedman interviews were apparently also conducted over the telephone, according to a quote attributed to him in Linda Corley’s book about Marcel and Roswell. According to her taped interview, Marcel said, “Now those guys, Charles Berlitz and William Moore, I bet I have spent as much as ten hours along these telephones with these two guys. I’ve never met either one of them.”

Corley questioned him on this point and Marcel said, “I never met them. They interviewed me on the phone.”

At that point, I’m sure that they have copies of the newspaper clippings some of which contained a picture of Marcel and the balloon wreckage and might have even gotten prints of the pictures from the Fort Worth Star - Telegram, but they couldn’t show these pictures to Marcel over the telephone. According to Berlitz and Moore, Marcel told them, over the telephone:

General Ramey allowed some members of the press in to take a picture of this stuff. They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less-interesting metallic debris. The press was allowed to photograph this, but were not allowed far enough into the room to touch it. The stuff in that one photo was pieces of the actual stuff we found. It was not a staged photo. Then they allowed photos. Those photos were taken while the actual wreckage was already on its way to Wright Field. I believe these were taken with the general and one of his aides…

If we look at that, and the captions about where Berlitz and Moore got the pictures, we see that there was some manipulation going on there. They got a quote from Marcel that endorsed the picture of him with some of the real debris, but we don’t know if it was the whole picture or the cropped version they printed. What is clear is that when Johnny Mann showed him the pictures in The Roswell Incident, Marcel said they didn’t show the real debris.

Yes, I know some of the skeptics just can’t imagine Marcel not keeping copies of the newspaper articles that mentioned his name but then suggest the whole flying saucer brouhaha was such an embarrassment to him that he would, decades later, attempt to spin the story. But I know that things get lost as the years pass and I know that my picture appeared in the Denver Post in the early 1970s receiving a military award for service in Vietnam but I do not have a copy of that article.

I suggest that it is possible that Marcel, not having seen the heavily cropped pictures that would be published in The Roswell Incident because the interviews were conducted over the telephone, would remember pictures being taken at the time but might have not remembered the sequence. His statement about him being with the real debris when the pictures were taken could easily refer to another event and not what had transpired in Ramey’s office. So, when shown copies of the pictures from Ramey’s office, he rightly said, “That’s not the stuff I picked up.”

This seems to be a plausible explanation for this dilemma. He was photographed with some of the real debris, but those pictures were not taken in Ramey’s office. It wasn’t Marcel getting coached into what to say about it, but how he actually remembered the events. Though there is another problem with this analysis and that is Marcel told Corley that on orders for Ramey, he had covered the real debris with the brown paper that is seen in the uncropped versions of all the pictures taken in Ramey’s office. This suggests that Marcel’s memories of those events might not be completely accurate.

Jesse Marcel, standing and pointing, briefing flight crews during the Second  World War.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

There are other problems that arise from these transcripts of earlier interviews. Pratt said that Marcel was awarded five Air Medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft, but given Pratt’s transcript and other information, this mistake might be Pratt’s rather than Marcel’s. In the transcripts of the raw footage of UFOs Are Real, it said, “10 April 1942 volunteered for active service… 1^st assignment Washington five Air Medals, the Bronze Star and several comendations [exactly as written out in the transcript].”

Since there is no mention of the five enemy aircraft, it would seem that the mistake was Pratt’s. The other problem is that there is only documentation for two Air Medals. As I have said before, my records did not contain the correct number of Air Medals, so we might have a similar situation. This just might not be sufficient reason to reject, out of hand, all that Marcel said.

What is more disturbing is his claim to have received a commendation for performing an appendectomy while in the service. This is something that should be recorded in his military record but I find nothing about it. I did find mention of another commendation for Marcel, but it was for service during Operation Crossroads. Maybe the commendation for the emergency surgery slipped through the cracks, but there comes a point when you can no longer blame Army inefficiency for the errors in the record (though I have said that if you do something wrong, that note has the permanence of the Pyramids and if you do something right it has the half-life of a mayfly).

There are two things I found in these transcripts that are interesting. First, Marcel said that after loading his car with the debris, “I stopped by the house had left the day before and son and wife were waiting for me.”

This is curious because the story had always seemed to be that he had awakened them to show them the strange debris. This suggests that he had stopped by so they wouldn’t worry and that it wasn’t very early in the morning but late evening. A minor problem at best.

In the transcript (which, by the way, is strange) it is noted that on “Tape 2” at the 24:16 minute mark, Marcel apparently told them that Haut had issued the press release before he had even returned from the field. The exact quote on this transcript is, “He (Walt Haut had released statement to press before Jesse had even returned home that night.” (Yes, this is how it was written out, so it is not exactly Marcel’s words.)

Apparently Marcel said that his wife had been “pestered by the news media.”

In Linda Corley’s book, Marcel makes a similar statement. He said, “She [wife] didn’t even know where I was. By the time I got home, she had already faced the press that was out there.”

What this does is screw up every time line created for this because we have the press release going out before Marcel got home… which had to be late afternoon at best given the distance from the debris field to Roswell even making the best time possible. Then we need to get Marcel on an aircraft early enough to get to Fort Worth in time to have his picture taken with the balloon debris.

It is possible, of course, that Marcel had confused coming home from the debris field with his coming home from Fort Worth after his quick trip there. He seems to have mixed up elements of the two events, confusing the timing, but then, that is just my speculation.

Then it gets worse, if possible. Marcel is quoted in the transcript, apparently paraphrasing General Ramey, “You can go ahead and scatter some of those pieces on the floor for the photographers and press but make sure they don’t get any details about anything.”

There was a question, “Was that the actual material you had found?”

“I prepared that for the press. (That big piece was not part of it). [parens in original document.]”

And then it gets better. Marcel said, “Let me show you something. There’s a picture of the same room [Ramey’s office, I will assume here] It’s not the material I brought there.”

Then on “Tape 3” comes more information. The director or the interviewer or the one asking questions said, “I talk about book I’m showing him [Which has to be something with the various pictures from Ramey’s office.] Book in Jesse’s lap showing warrant officer [has to be Irving Newton and that rules out The Roswell Incident]. The director asked, “This is not the material you found?” Marcel said, “Definitely not.”

The trouble here is that Marcel in the same film said that if he was in the photographs it was the real stuff and if it was anyone else, it was the fake. But now we learn that he was shown those photographs during that filming and before anyone could teach him the right answer, said that it wasn’t the material he had brought from Roswell.

The questions then, have been answered, sort of. We learn that the first interview was probably not recorded and are treated to Friedman’s recollections of what was said. We learn that the interviews of Marcel by Berlitz and Moore were conducted over the telephone. We do find quotes from Marcel that seem to contradict the story as it has been told for all these years which is quite troubling. And we find other quotes that seem to support that story, which suggests some manipulation by the various UFO researchers. Is it enough to reject now what Marcel said? Depends on your point of view, but we do have more information that suggests Marcel’s memories are not completely reliable on many of these points and at this time, that might be the best we can do.

(Note: For those interested, this has grown much larger than I anticipated. I looked through Marcel’s service record again, I reviewed the other material in that file, rereading after decades some of the partial transcripts that I have which provide some disturbing information, looked again a Linda Corley’s book to see what she said about the early interviews with Marcel, and reviewed what Friedman had published. There is more to this story, which I’ll get into some form for publication.)

Doctor Jesse Marcel and the Roswell UFO

There has been something that has bothered me for a long time. I have been trying to figure out the hatred directed at Jesse Marcel, Jr. by many in the skeptical and the non-believers arenas. Marcel, for the few of you who might not know, was the eleven-year-old son of Major Jesse Marcel who recovered some of the debris found on the Brazel (Foster) ranch. Both Marcels, in interviews conducted some thirty and forty years after the fact, suggested that the material they saw was extraordinary and extraterrestrial. Marcel, Sr. sort of started the whole Roswell craze with his statements to Stan Friedman, Len Stringfield and several others.

Okay, we can argue all day about what Marcel really saw back in 1947 and we can argue about how trustworthy the memories of an eleven-year-old boy might be after so much time. We can suggest that he was influenced by his father who told him it was a flying saucer and we can say that all this hoopla around Roswell in the last twenty-five or thirty years has certainly colored his opinions.

On the other hand, no one can deny that something was found and the remnants, whatever they might have been, were not easily identifiable to Marcel, Sr., and he certainly communicated that confusion to his son. But there was something found and none of the mundane explanations offered so far provide much of an answer.

But that’s not the point here. The point is that Jesse Marcel, Jr. (seen here), a retired colonel from the Montana National Guard, who spent a year in Iraq, and who was a successful physician, said that he had seen the debris, he had handled it, had seen the strange markings on it, and believes it to be of extraterrestrial origin. Is that a reason for dragging his name through the mud, or an excuse for some of the truly vicious letters, calls, emails, and Internet postings about him?

And here is one other point. In late May I was at a UFO symposium put on by Illinois MUFON. During one of the morning sessions a man who was about seventy began to feel poorly. He was dizzy, pale, and on the verge of collapse. He staggered into the hall and when I first saw him, he was lying on the carpet with a couple of people around him, trying to help.

As I moved toward the man, I saw Jesse Marcel, Jr., a real live doctor, crouched near this man, holding his hand, checking his pulse and vitals, and talking to him, gathering information. Marcel was doing all that he could for the man, calming him down, learning his medical history and treating him as best he could.

Others, at Marcel’s direction, made the telephone calls to 9-1-1, arranged for the medics to arrive, and as soon as they got there, they asked Jesse about the man. By that time the man’s color had returned, he was no longer dizzy, and his heartbeat had returned to normal. The medics asked Jesse about all this and then went about their business because they had their machines and medicines. But it was Jesse who took charge in that situation and helped the man until the medics arrived.

So, you’re thinking, "What’s the point?" Just this, many of those attacking Jesse Marcel would have been standing around wondering what to do to help the stricken man. They have nothing going for them except their attack columns and their meanspirited commentary. They have no training, they have no other skills and they do little but take up space in an already crowded world.

And many of them seem to hate Jesse Marcel, Jr. (seen here with me at the Illinois MUFON Symposium) because he said, as a boy, he’d held pieces of an alien spaceship. This seems to be something they just can’t forgive or forget, but in the great cosmos, does it really matter? It’s not as if Jesse is making this up. It’s not as if he came forward with this story in search of the spotlight and the fame this little tale would provide for him.

No, he just happened to be there, in Roswell, in July, 1947, when his father brought home some strange debris. Would his life be somehow diminished if that had never happened? No. He still would have gone to medical school and he still would have risen to colonel in a real military organization. He still would have saved lives in Iraq.

Can we say that Jesse is lying about this? Not really. There is evidence for his tale. Hell, the newspapers of the time talked about it. He did see something. All we can do is disagree with his interpretation of what it was. Is that any reason to attack him as a person, attack his integrity, or suggest that he is somehow less than human?

If Jesse was some kind of huckster, out there pedaling a product that hurt people, if he was swindling them out of their life savings, if he was endangering them, then yes, let’s stop him. But all he has done is tell those interested what he saw as a boy. His livelihood does not depend on this story, yet he is gracious enough to tell all who ask what he saw.

That is no reason for some of the viciousness that I have seen directed toward him. If some of those who seem so incensed had contributed a tenth of what Jesse has given to the human race, then we might want to listen to them. But most of them just seem to be unable to separate a memory Jesse has of a night encounter with debris that might well have come from an alien ship from everything good he has done as a man. Those detractors have done nothing but snipe from the woods, often because they are too chicken to come out into the light of day.

If nothing else, we all should be able to agree that Jesse saw something that to him was strange. We might disagree with the interpretation, but then, can’t we do that as civilized humans and leave all the other nonsense to those who have no class? Can’t we leave the name calling to others? Can’t we elevate the debate to a civilized level, remembering that Jesse has made an important contribution to society, and leave it at that?

Another Mishmash of Fact

I know that I said I was done with responding to Kal Korff, and I know that when I watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I get tired of his rants about Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but sometimes it’s just so much fun.

Take the latest rant. He quotes from one of my books and goes into a typical rant.

The quotes that annoy him so much are these:

Marcel said about the debris, "I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what we were picking up." He said that some of the debris was thin as newsprint, feather light but so strong they couldn’t dent it or burn it. He described foil-like material, I-beams, and "...other stuff there that looked very much like parchment that didn’t burn.'"

Marcel was so impressed by what he had seen that he stopped at his house on the way back to the base. He wanted his wife and son to see the debris. When Jesse Marcel, Jr. saw the strange material, he asked his father what it was. Marcel, Sr. "It’s a flying saucer."

Marcel, Jr. Said that he saw some foil material that was thicker than lead foil and that was much stronger. He mentioned the I-beams which seemed to be made out of layered foil and that was embossed with writing. Marcel Jr. described the writing as, "Purple. Strange. Never saw anything like it.

He then says, "Well, no folks, he didn’t say it was a flying saucer. They didn’t use that word back then. They said flying disk. That’s it."

Here is the front page of the Roswell Daily Record for July 8, 1947. Clearly it says, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region."

The next day, the headline reads, "Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer."

In case you think that it was only in Roswell that they used that term, though it certainly proves my case because it shows the term in use in Roswell, here, from the Des Moines Register of July 4, 1947, "Army Probes ‘Flying Saucer’ Stories."

And from the Herald American (Syracuse, New York) "Flying Saucers Reported By Scores in 28 States."

So where did he get the idea that they didn’t use the term flying saucer in July 1947? I found lots more examples, so clearly they did.

The other part of the quote that sets him off is the term I-beam. He says that Marcel didn’t use that term and in fact, Marcel said that his son got it wrong.

Well, looking at the interview that Linda Corley did with Jesse Marcel, Sr. in 1981 (and not available until after 1993), it appears that Marcel did say that during her interview. At least it seems that way. Marcel drew a picture of the cross section of one of the smaller members and it is rectangular. If you look at the "I-beam" that Marcel, Jr. had made, you see that it is nearly rectangular as well. Yes, there is a "I" shape to it, but the top and bottom cross beams are small.

And something that Korff fails to report is that Corley said when she shared her tapes with Stan Friedman, she had to go back to create transcripts because the tapes, sitting on a shelf, had degraded quite a bit. They were difficult to understand and Corley had to interpret the words and phrases, so it’s possible that the senior Marcel wasn’t quite as positive as Korff and others now believe.

Korff goes on to say, "Jesse Marcel, Jr., he claims he saw an I-beam and he’s the only one who did... And his father Jesse Marcel, Sr. says, ‘No.’"

According to Korff, "Jesse [Jr.] got that wrong. He was a little boy. He was only 11 years old... No other Roswell witness reported I-beams at all. None. Zero."

Except, of course, for Robert Shirkey, who, in January 1990, in a personal interview described the scene as some of the debris was carried through the Operations building. In a telephone interview, Shirkey said, "Marcel was carrying a box that had the I-beams sticking up in one corner...

Much later, Steve Lytle, in an interview conducted with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, used the term I-beams.

And another witness Jack Trowbridge said, "It was aluminum in appearance. There were fragments of aircraft skin, or whatever the thing was and also some girders with pictures of hieroglyphics..."

So, Korff goes off on a tangent here, claims that no one else ever mentioned the I-beams and yet, without much effort, I was able to locate two additional witnesses. Trowbridge doesn’t say "I-beam," but does say girders, which can be construed as an I-beam-like structure and that runs the score to three.

Finally, in this latest mishmash, Korff said, "The U.S. government did launch one [Mogul balloon] to spy on the Soviets..."

This isn’t quite right either. Yes, the purpose of Mogul was to spy on the Soviets, but they could never keep the balloons aloft long enough for them to drift over the Soviet Union, and the coming of the spy planes, and much later, satellites, did in the need for Mogul. It just never worked the way it was supposed to.

The real reason that I’m forced to post this here is that Korff, in his YouTube rants, disables the comments section. No one has the opportunity to suggest that maybe he’s off base on his claims. Had I been able to comment on YouTube, I would have done this there.

Once again I apologize for dragging you all along with me on this, but then, sometimes it is fun to see how badly he muffs the ball.

This will be the last time for a response to Korff here. There is a marvelous little blog at http://www.kalisanidiot.blogspot.com/ and I’ll try to get the host there to post any more responses I feel are needed. Maybe I should just let it go because no matter what Korff says, when all the facts are presented, the story is different than he says, sometimes wildly so.

The New Jesse Marcel Interview

Periodically, I’m asked if there is anything new to be found about the Roswell crash. I believe that all the first-hand witnesses to those events in July 1947 have died. The last first-hand witness I interviewed was Stanley Muelling on January 18, 2012 when he was 87 years old.

He made it clear that he had been told to never talk about what he had seen. He said, “If I did, I already forgot about it. I’m supposed to forget.”

At that point, meaning in 2012, we realized that there were very few left who would have been in Roswell at the right time. Although today Muelling would be 100, it is certainly possible for him to still be alive, but I know of no one still alive who could provide a first-hand account that would add to our basic knowledge of the case.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other means of gathering first-hand testimony. Just this week, we learned from David Marler at the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque that Lee Speigel had interviewed Jesse Marcel, Sr. about Roswell in the early 1980s. That interview was recorded and is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC3Ln3-tyds

He asked Marcel about the beginnings of the tale and Marcel provided us the details of how he learned about the crash site and his meeting with Mack Brazel. Marcel gathered Sheridan Cavitt to follow Brazel back to the ranch. This is slightly interesting because Bessie Brazel Schreiber who had talked about accompanying her father into Roswell to report what he had found isn’t mentioned. Bill Brazel has disputed Bessie’s claim and here is Marcel, talking about following Brazel to the ranch, stopping at what he called a shack where the ate beans and rice but no mention of Bessie Brazel being there. That takes her out of the picture and her claims that it was a huge balloon, are negated. I mention this so we don’t get bogged down in a discussion about her role in this and point out that she later repudiated her claim that she was there.

The Debris Field. Brazel took Don Schmitt and me to the top
of the rise and pointed down. You can see that a gouge
should have been visible to Marcel.

And listening to this, I think that Marcel has gotten the timeline wrong. He told Speigel, “And by the time I got back home, my wife, is what happened to you? There’s been a bunch of news reporters out here wanting a picture of you and I said, ‘For what.’’’

There would have been no reporters interested in Jesse Marcel on July 7 when he returned from the debris field. The only people who knew what had been found were Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt. Naturally, when Cavitt returned, he would have notified his superior in Albuquerque since Cavitt’s chain of command was different than Marcel’s. It is probable that Cavitt, out of courtesy, would have told Blanchard, but there was no requirement for that. Cavitt might just have waited for Marcel to return to tell Blanchard about the crash.

The point is, that the press release wasn’t issued until the afternoon of July 8, at which time the reporters would have learned about Marcel. At that point they certainly could have arrived at his house to ask questions. Marcel was in Fort Worth at the time and wouldn’t return until July 9.

Major Jesse Marcel with the balloon debris in 
General Ramey's office in Fort Worth.

   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

In this interview, Marcel reconfirms the size of the debris field being ¾ of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. He suggested there was quite a bit of metallic debris. He talked about filling the jeep carry all with debris and that he, Marcel, filled his Buick as well. He said there was quite a lot of it left behind. The real point here is that a Mogul array, would not have filled the jeep carry all. And, since it is clear from the testimony of Charles Moore, an engineer with the balloon project in Alamogordo, that Flight #4, the culprit in this, did not have rawin targets. The remains of the balloon array would have fit into the Marcel’s car trunk. These facts rule out Mogul.

Marcel said that he sent Cavitt back to the base with a truckload of debris and that he, Marcel, stayed on quite a bit. He then drove home, arriving about eight that evening.

There is one point that I’m sure the skeptics will seize on, if they are paying attention. Asked about when he was getting curious about flying saucers, Marcel said:

On thing I wanted to explore, I wanted to find out if it was an object that hit the ground. And obviously it was not because no scar on the ground anywhere. Something obviously exploded in the air and fragments scattered all over the place… Well, this is what happened. I scoured the ground. I looked all over the place to see if I could see any scare one the ground, if something had fallen our of the sky and hit the ground. But that was not in evidence at all. It was obviously something that exploded while in flight and scattered fragments on the ground as it traveled.

This is in direct conflict with what Bill Brazel told both Don Schmitt and me, as we stood on the debris field. Brazel said it was about five hundred yards long and about ten feet wide at its widest. He said that it took about two years before is was completely grassed over.

Bill Brazel on the Debris Field with Don Schmitt.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

We also interviewed Bud Payne a retired judge who escorted us to the debris field in the early 1990s. Payne pointed to the same areas as had Bill Brazel, telling us about a gouge in the ground.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who flew over the area in the months that followed mentioned two crash sites. He was referring to the debris field near Corona, and another site closer to Roswell. He mentioned seeing vehicle tracks in the area and a gouge, confirming what Brazel had told others several months earlier.

This is something of a conundrum. According to Brazel, the gouge was obvious, but Marcel doesn’t mention it. He talks about the size of the debris field and says the object exploded in the air. Don, Tom Carey and I have all stood on the raised ground at the beginning of the debris field and from that vantage point, we can see to the point that Brazel indicated was the end of the gouge. I have no idea why Marcel said that he didn’t see it.

There are many other gems in the Speigel interview. He asked Marcel about any personal UFO sightings. Marcel talked about seeing a strange formation of lights prior to the events of July 1947. According to Marcel, he had been called by the provost marshal and told to hurry out to the base. Marcel told Speigel, that this was something that he had never mentioned to anyone.

Marcel said, “And while going out there as fast as my car could run, I saw some lights in the sky, but it was a defined formation. It is a perfect “V” formation.”

He said that the formation was visible from overhead to the horizon, and suggested the formation was moving faster than any aircraft in the military inventory of 1947.

He did mention it to Major Edwin Easley who was the provost marshal at the time. Easley said that some of the boys over here saw that too.

Marcel said, “What it was, I still don’t know.”

One of the other criticisms of the Marcel testimony was his suggestion that he didn’t know what it was but he was sure that while it came to Earth, it was not from Earth. Skeptics wondered how he made this leap because, in 1947, there were tales of spaceships in the Buck Rogers’ comic strip and Flash Gordon was battling Ming the Merciless, but no real suggestion of alien visitation.

An interesting point, but Brazel’s arrival in Roswell was about two weeks after Kenneth Arnold made his sighting. Newspapers of the time were filled with stories about other flying saucer reports, not to mention the Foo Fighters of World War II and the Ghost Rockets seen over Scandinavia in 1946. Marcel, as the intelligence officer would have been aware of all these things so that when he was confronted with metallic debris that was so foreign to him, he recognized none of it and when he saw the size of the debris field, the conclusion that it was something off world wasn’t that radical. Speculations in the newspapers of the time ran the gambit from spots before the eyes, war hysteria, outright hoxes to creatures from Mars and Venus. Marcel didn’t grab the idea out of thin air; it was floating right there in front of him

There are additional questions that need answers in this newly retrieved interview. There are other points that seem to be contradictory. All this must be examined with an unbiased and dispassionate eye. And we need to put it into the context of the time, remembering that some memories fade and others are modified when new information is encountered. Sometimes the witnesses don’t lie, but are telling the truth as they remember it. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong and sometimes they just want their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

If Marcel was a stand-alone witness on the Roswell crash, we would be right rejecting all that he says as delusion or confabulation. But every member of Colonel Blanchard’s staff we interviewed, with one exception, suggested the extraterrestrial as the ultimate solution. And there were dozens of others who had a small piece of the pie that when added to other pieces suggests something other than a weather balloon. 

Jesse Marcel and Accident Investigation

I was surfing the net the other night and found a posting that suggested Jesse Marcel, Sr., had violated regulations with his response to the report of debris by Mack Brazel. The premise seemed to be that this was an aircraft accident and military regulations provide for a precise, and classified, response to such an event. Because of this breach of military procedure, we can ignore the testimony provided by Jesse Marcel.

The first note at this site was that Marcel had been so unimpressed with the information that he finished his lunch and then made his way to the sheriff’s office to find out what was going on. Marcel told Bill Moore, as reported in The Roswell Incident, “I was eating lunch at the officers’ club when the call came through saying that I should go out and talk to Brazel. The sheriff said that Brazel had told him that something had exploded over Brazel’s ranch and that there was a lot of debris scattered around… I finished my lunch and went into town to talk to this fellow.”

This certainly demonstrates no sense of urgency on Marcel’s part but we must remember that Marcel had seen nothing, apparently not talked to Brazel, and probably knew that whatever had happened, it had nothing to do with the 509^th Bomb Group… which means that had they lost an aircraft, Marcel would have known. Besides it is clear from other interviews that the sheriff did not initially believe Brazel’s story. With that, Marcel’s  sense of urgency would have been aroused.

Phyllis (Wilcox) McGuire, in July 1947, lived at the jail with her father George Wilcox and she heard some of the exchanges that took place between the sheriff, the rancher and the military. In an interview that Don Schmitt and I conducted on January 27, 1990, McGuire said that the military arrived quickly, almost as if they had been waiting for the call (and please don’t read anymore into that… McGuire just said they got there to what she thought of as quickly). I mention this only to point out that whoever wrote that other piece, saying that Marcel didn’t seem to care, had not reviewed all the literature on the subject.

Now if we wish to plow the field of speculation, as did that other writer, let me say this. If I had been Marcel, and had the sheriff called me to tell me that a rancher had found something that seemed to have exploded in the sky, I probably would have checked with Operations to find out if any of our aircraft were missing. Or, it could be that Marcel asked the sheriff when the debris was found, and learning it wasn’t within the last twenty-four hours, knew that it didn’t belong to the 509^th, but it might have been something launched from White Sands (if Marcel didn’t know that there was a moratorium on launches after a rocket had fallen in Mexico that May… and yes, I know the moratorium had been lifted, but the July 3 launch, the first in several weeks, didn’t get off the pad).

So, knowing that it is not one of the 509^th’s airplanes, and suspecting it was not an Air Force (Army Air Forces if you wish to get technical) aircraft, and possibly knowing that it wasn’t something lost in the last twenty-four hours, Marcel finished his lunch and drove to the sheriff’s office. There he talked to Brazel, thought that something interesting had been found (after looking at the debris Brazel had brought in), drove back to the base to consult with his commander, and then, with Sheridan Cavitt, followed Brazel back to the ranch. At no time was there speculation that this was an aircraft accident and therefore, the analysis, based on this assumption, is now null and void.

Once Marcel arrived on the debris field, and once he saw the wreckage there, he would have known that it was neither aircraft nor rocket. It was not something that required any special handling, if we are guided simply by regulations. If it was a balloon, then there was nothing special about it and the regulations do not come into play. If it was an alien spacecraft, and the skeptics are fond of telling us that he wouldn’t have recognized it as such at the time… and if the debris was of the few varieties mentioned by Bill Brazel and what Marcel told Bill Moore, then the regulations didn’t come into play. There was nothing on the field, at that precise moment, that would suggest to Marcel that this required special handling.

The point here is not to argue about what Brazel found or what Marcel saw, but to refute the idea that Marcel violated regulations by his actions. This was not an aircraft accident and those regulations simply did not apply. We can argue about what Marcel should have done but we do know what he did. With Cavitt, he picked up some of the debris. Cavitt headed back and Marcel stayed out there a little longer. He then returned to Roswell… and never said a word about seeing bodies or anything other than the strange metallic debris.

He was then caught up in the whirlwind of the press release, and others, at a higher rank (or pay grade if you wish to use today’s vernacular), made the decisions. At no time, according to the available records or documentation, was Marcel criticized about his response to the sheriff’s phone call or his reactions to it. Given that, I think we can ignore the idea that Marcel violated regulations. We can ignore that whole, ridiculous posting (and no, I’m not publishing a link to it simply because I have no desire to drive traffic to it).

Jesse Marcel - A Dispassionate Look

There has been, again, an assault on the integrity of Jesse Marcel, Sr., by one who has never served in the military and who seems to believe that if it didn’t appear in Marcel’s service record, then it must be a lie. Such simplistic thinking has, for too long, influenced both sides of the UFO question. In the real world there are shades of gray and we must remember that to understand much of what happens in UFOlogy we must be aware of that.

I thought that if we attempted a dispassionate look at Marcel, we might learn something. Oh, it’s not going to lead us to flying saucers and alien bodies, but it might teach us something about the case anyway.

Marcel, in discussing flying saucers (a term very much in use in 1947, though there are those who deny this) with his ham radio buddies in the late 1970s, said that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucer while he was stationed in Roswell (do I need to append New Mexico to this). It was just conversation among friends, but one of those friends was also a station manager in New Orleans who mentioned Marcel to Stan Friedman.

Friedman, and then Len Stringfield, interviewed Marcel who told them about picking up pieces of flying saucer. By searching newspaper files starting with the Arnold sighting on June 24, 1947, they found (or rather I am told William Moore found) a picture of Marcel holding up some of this alleged flying saucer debris on July 9, 1947.

So we come to the first question. In 1947 what did flying saucer mean? Was it a term applied only to alien spaceships or did it have a more general connotation?

Given what I have read in the newspapers and magazines from that era, it would seem to me that flying saucer meant any sort of object, mirage, or apparition seen in the sky. It didn’t necessarily mean spacecraft and I think that it rarely meant spacecraft.

True, that was sometimes the definition applied then but it wasn’t as fixed as it is now. So, when Marcel told his son he had pieces of a flying saucer, he might not have meant it was an alien ship.

I can, of course, interview the son about that and I remember the words he said his father spoke when Jesse Jr. found the writing embossed on the small I-beam. His father said that Jesse Jr. might have been the first person in the world to have seen writing from another world... but in this discussion, I’m thinking that flying saucer was a more generic term than it is today, which, of course doesn’t mean that Marcel wasn’t thinking alien in 1947.

If we look at his statements to various investigators, in front of the media, and to others he talked to, what he described is mainly bits and pieces of debris that had no real shape and provided no real clue to what the overall craft, or object, might have been. Bits of metal, thick paper and thin foil are basically bits of metal, thick paper and thin foil. It is not what you would expect to find littering a crash site, but then, you would certainly find that sort of thing scattered among the larger pieces unless the thing disintegrated or that the field Marcel walked was only part of the crash site. Others suggest that the main body of the craft had come down elsewhere and Bill Brazel told me there was a gouge suggesting something heavy had hit and skipped. Marcel didn’t mention the gouge and as far as I know, no one asked him about that specifically.

So, we have some metallic debris and the like which suggests a technology that was advanced beyond ours but the problem is not with the descriptions of the debris by Marcel but the interpretation put on it. It would seem that everyone, debunker, skeptic, researcher and believer concedes that Marcel handled the material that he claimed to have handled. No one is accusing him of lying about this.

The darling of the debunkers, Sheridan Cavitt, in his official statement to the Air Force, said that he didn’t remember if Marcel had gone out to the field with him or not. He didn’t deny it, he just wasn’t sure. What is important is that Cavitt talked about the debris, but his interpretation of it was that it was something of terrestrial manufacture and unimportant. He never explained why, after he had returned from the Debris Field he didn’t mention this to Colonel Blanchard, the 509^th Bomb Group commanding officer.

Yes, I know that Cavitt’s chain of command did not pass through the 509^th Headquarters, but instead to the CIC office in Albuquerque. But then, if Cavitt had accompanied Marcel to the Debris Field, Blanchard would have asked both what they had seen. Apparently Cavitt did not mention he thought it was all a balloon when he spoke to Blanchard.

But again, we have no evidence of Marcel lying. We have a disagreement as to interpretation of the debris they saw. Cavitt thought balloon and Marcel thought flying saucer.

We all seem to agree that Marcel went out to the Debris Field. We all agree that he found material that he believed to be exotic. We agree that he took it home and then out to the base. Marcel had not lied about any of that. Others witnessed various parts of that activity so we have independent corroboration.

We all agree that Marcel had been a major in 1947, he was the air intelligence officer of the 509^th Bomb Group, and that he held bits of what he believed to be a flying saucer, whatever definition we wish to apply to those words today. So where does this idea that Marcel was a liar come from?

It can all be traced to a transcript of an interview that was conducted by Bob Pratt in 1978. Pratt’s transcript is sometimes garbled with his questions or comments inserted into the middle of Marcel’s statements. I believe that Pratt was careful in transcribing what Marcel said, was less careful with his own comments, and while he would have understood the transcript completely though today we are sometimes confused.

Karl Pflock, in his Roswell book, printed the transcript, but he cleaned it up. He put his spin on some of the words, and as I have said before, the insertion of a comma in one place changes the meaning of the answer to one of those confusing questions.

Again there is little dispute about what he described as seeing on the Debris Field. The problem arises when we begin to compare his service record with what he said in the Pratt interview. Some of the things said here were not repeated to others, which makes me wonder how this came about.

At the being of the interview, Marcel said, "I had flying experience before going in service, started flying in 1928, so being in the air was not foreign to me."

This has been interpreted to be Marcel suggesting that he had been a pilot as far back as 1928, yet when he was asked, in a pre-commissioning interview in 1942 what his hobbies were, he mentioned photography and ham radio. He said nothing about aviation. But he did mention was a cartographer and that he worked from aerial photographs and part of his experience was flying over the areas.

However, and this is important, he said only that he had been flying since 1928 but not that he was a pilot. As part of his job as a cartographer, he flew but did not pilot the aircraft. We have a wash on this. No lie from Marcel, but a misinterpretation from those who wish to assassinate his character. I know from my own experience that when I first joined the Army I mentioned nothing about my previous flying experience, although most of it was as a student with limited hours as a pilot. What this all means to me is that Marcel had flown as part of his job but hadn’t piloted the aircraft and in his interview entering active duty simply did not mention this because, at the time, it was irrelevant and unimportant.

There are two other points in the Pratt interview that talk about flying experience. Marcel mentioned that he had 438 hours of combat time, which meant that he had flown into combat as a member of a crew. Some suggest he was a passenger in an aircraft that was flying into combat, but I suggest he was a member of the crew rather than just a passenger. The exact nature of his position in the aircraft is irrelevant and we have documentation to support his tale of combat flying hours.

He then mentioned that, "...[I] was intelligence officer for bomb wing, flew as pilot, waist gunner and bombardier at different times..."

Now we have Marcel saying he was a pilot, at least to those who weren’t paying attention. He said he had flown AS a pilot, not that he was one and this is a vital distinction. He was not claiming to have been rated and his military record reflects that he was not a military pilot. This does not mean he hadn’t flown as a pilot.

No one seems worried that he also said that he had flown as a bombardier or waist gunner. Again, he wasn’t saying that he had been trained in those positions, only that he had flown in them. This, to me, means he wasn’t lying, but giving an accurate accounting of his experience. In aviation units, those not rated in specific positions sometimes fly in them.

There is a scene in 12 O’Clock High in which they have returned from the first bombing mission in Germany. General Savage learns that half the ground staff has made the mission flying as waist gunners, men who were not rated in those positions but made the mission anyhow.

Yes, this is fiction, but my own experience in an aviation unit bears this out. I gave "stick time" to crew chiefs and door gunners and myself flew as a door gunner on occasion. Nothing in our records would reflect this.

In other words, I don’t see this as a lie by Marcel either. He had the opportunity to do those things and did them. They just weren’t mentioned in his military record and I wouldn’t expect them to be.

The problem is actually when he apparently said he had 3000 hours of pilot time. This is a huge number for someone who is not rated. I have something like 16 – 1700 hours, if you count everything, and I was rated.

But I don’t know how this number came up. In Pflock’s version of the interview, he has Pratt asking the question. According to that version, "Pratt: You had three thousand hours as a pilot – "

Marcel said, "Right [and] eight thousand hours [total] time."

The way it appears in the Pratt interview is "Q – 3000 hrs pilot (right) 8000 hrs flying time."

I could argue that it was Pratt who introduced this number into the discussion and we don’t know where it originated. I could argue that we don’t have Marcel saying this, but to be fair, he seems to be agreeing to it which is really the same thing.

In the end, it seems to me that the 1928 as the date when he started flying is irrelevant because that was when he started flying as a map maker. He didn’t say he started flying as a pilot in 1928. That is an assumption that others have made over the years and I don’t think anyone ever asked Marcel about this.

Later he said that he had flown as a pilot, and this too, is the truth. He wasn’t saying that he was rated or a pilot but that he had flown as one, as well as a waist gunner and bombardier. This too, seems to be the truth.

The problem for me is this claim of 3000 hours as a pilot and 8000 flying time. While I can ignore the 8000 hours total time simply because he was in aviation units and we know he had nearly 500 hours in combat make that total number a little more palatable.

But the 3000 hours of pilot time is quite worrisome... I can’t see how that is possible for a non-pilot even in an aviation unit. This would seem to be an embellishment but I have no evidence that the number is inaccurate... and in the end, no one else does either. Marcel never really did say he had been a pilot.

I suppose this could be seen as splitting a fine hair but do we really want to trash a man’s reputation for something like this... something that we can’t prove is a lie. It might just be true, though I find it hard to believe.

Those attacking Marcel also accuse him of lying when he said he was shot down once, on his third mission and that he claimed he was the sole survivor. The debunkers have gone wild with this claim which is really one that we can provide a resolution to.

Debunkers have said there was nothing in his file to show that he was shot down and I say there wouldn’t be unless he had been put in for an award of some kind. There is no place to make such a note and it was such a common occurrence that it didn’t merit mention.

Pflock, in his interpretation of this wrote, "Marcel: I got shot down one time, my third mission, out of Port Moresby.

"Pratt: Did everyone survive?"

"Marcel: All but one crashed into a mountain."

In this interpretation, Marcel is saying that everyone but one crashed into the mountain which means there was another survivor.

However, if I add a comma, I change the meaning. "Marcel: All, but one crashed into a mountain."

Now everyone, but a single poor soul survived.

In the Pratt interview, it appears like this, "... I got shot down one time, my third mission, out of Port Moresby (everyone survive) all but one crashed into a mountain."

No matter how you slice it, Marcel didn’t claim he was the only survivor as many of the debunkers allege. This is a clear win for Marcel. No evidence that he was lying and no evidence that he claimed he was the only survivor.

For me, the most troubling is the claims in the Pratt interview are for college credit and a college degree. Again, the Pratt transcript is garbled. In the Pratt interview, it said (and reproduced here exactly as it is in the transcript), "... degree in nuclear physics (bachelors) at completed work at GW Univ inWash. attended (LSU, Houston, U of Wis, NY Univ, Ohio State) , Docotr pool? and GW..."

Prior to entering the Army, Marcel mentioned that he had attended LSU for a year and a half, but there is a qualification on one of the documents. In parentheses, it said, "Uncredit." I have no idea what that means. Did he merely audit the classes? Did he flunk out? Did he receive an incomplete?

I did check with the other universities mentioned, asking each if there were any kind of extension courses that Marcel might have taken while on active duty. All replied that he hadn’t attended their schools in any official capacity. I do know that some of the military courses he took were taught at universities, but nothing to suggest any civilian education at them. The Pratt interview seems to be the only place he made these claims and they are not true.

In the end we have seem to have a single example of Marcel lying but even this makes no sense. Why claim to have attended so many schools? Why say this at all because someone was going to check?

Does this really suggest that we could trust nothing that Marcel said? We all agree that he walked the Debris Field. We all agree that he picked up the material. We all agree that something fell. But because we have some ambiguous statements on a transcript that is sometimes garbled, we’re simply going to reject everything that he said, even when it is corroborated by others whose testimony is trusted.

Since this is a dispassionate look, which means I’m not debating the point, but attempting to understand it, there is one other interview that is important. I don’t understand how the skeptics have missed it for the last decade but I have seen little mention of it (and now I’m sure it will be quoted to prove that Marcel was a liar... I can see the headline, "Jesse Marcel admits the Roswell case a lie.")

Dr. Linda Corley is from Houma, Louisiana, which was where Jesse Marcel lived. She said that in 1981, while working on a school project, she called Marcel and asked for an interview. She spent about four hours with Marcel and his wife, Viaud, and said that she "can’t remember a more pleasant or interesting visit."

Rather than repeat what she heard from Marcel during that interview because it is essentially what he said to everyone else, I’ll mention what happened in the days that followed. According to Corley, she received a telephone call from Marcel. She said, "I can still hear Jesse’s frantic voice on the telephone saying NOT to use any of the material obtained from my conversation with him. He seemed almost hysterical when he called my home, the first time, several days after the interview."

Then, according to Corley, "He stated that everything he told me was a lie."

She also said, "Well, I knew most of what he said was previously published material, given on other interviews, so I figured that this was only his way of trying to prevent me from using the information given me. But I did not know why. My heart really went out to him. He sounded so scared. The second telephone call was similar to the first. A day or so later he called to inquire if I had released any of the information to the press. I assured him that it was only for a school project but he insisted that I was going to the press with it. I tried to calm him and promised him that I would not use any of the personal information if he did not want me to. However, that did not seem to console him. I just didn’t know what to make of his strange behavior..."

So, contrary to what a debunker has written, Viaud Marcel never said it was a lie. That quote came from her husband under what sounded like duress. I don’t know why he would want to repudiate what he had said in the past, though I can speculate. However, this is to be a dispassionate look, so I’ll leave those speculations for later.

What we all really disagree about here is the interpretation that Marcel, in his later life, put on what he had found in New Mexico in 1947. Because some of us don’t agree with that interpretation, they’re going to smear his reputation, even though we know that the military records are often incomplete, that we can see how some conclusions about his statements were drawn both by Pratt and others who read his interview transcript later, and that there is confusion in what was actually said by Marcel.

I understand that some believe that if Marcel is eliminated from the Roswell case, major damage has been done, which I suspect is the reason for the smear campaign. But when you look at it carefully, all you see is that Marcel claimed to have picked up strange debris that he couldn’t identify. He was who he said he was, which means he was the air intelligence officer in 1947. He was on Blanchard’s staff and every other staff officer who was interviewed with a single exception agreed with him. He believed the material was of alien manufacture.

The confusion then, comes from the Pratt interview and Marcel’s actual record. You can decide if those discrepancies are enough for you to reject what he said or if they are the sorts of trouble you run into when looking at the written words of an interview made decades earlier and a set of military records that are even older.

Personally, in the end, I will not label Marcel a liar for those discrepancies simply because there are enough problems with my military records and what I know to be the facts in my record to suggest similar problems exist with Marcel’s records.

We can disagree about the interpretation but the case for Marcel being a liar is not proved. This, I believe, is the conclusion that a dispassionate look will sustain. We haven’t reached the extraterrestrial, but I think we understand a bit more of the situation in Roswell in 1947.