Major Jesse Marcel
When the investigation began back in 1978, when both Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield learned about Major Jesse Marcel, no one else from the 509th had mentioned anything about the UFO crash. Marcel provided the initial information that set off the investigations and Marcel was the Intelligence Officer, the A-2, on the staff. He was in a position to know.
As we have seen, Marcel went out to the Debris Field with Sheridan Cavitt and Mack Brazel. Marcel said they arrived too late in the day to go out to the Debris Field because it would be too dark to see anything useful. Instead they spent the night in a one room building just north of the field. Marcel said they ate cold beans and Cavitt denies that he was in Roswell, or went to the field or stayed in the shack. I note this again because it provides us with a glimpse of who was saying what about the crash and who was attempting to thwart the investigation.
The next morning, according to an interview conducted by the late Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer and given to anyone who asked for a copy (such was Pratt’s generosity), Brazel prepared to led them to the Debris Field. He saddled two horses, but Marcel had never ridden a horse. Cavitt and Brazel took the horses and Marcel drove the jeep. Interestingly, it was Cavitt who gave me this little nugget of information.
From the top of a ridge line, they could see the shallow valley where the debris was scattered. Marcel told researchers that it was scattered over an area of about three-quarters of a mile long and couple of hundred feet wide. He is also quoted as saying that the debris was scattered over about a square mile. He said, “I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what I was picking up.”
Maybe I should note here, although we’ll explore it more, that the modern Air Force answer of a balloon array from the then classified Project Mogul, does not work. The size of the Debris Field is simply too large. The balloon array that will be tapped as the culprit, according to the documentation available, was not large enough, nor did it contain the right types of material, no matter what the Air Force would like us to believe today.
Marcel would describe the material as being as thin as newsprint and yet so strong that a sledgehammer couldn’t dent it. There was a thin, foil-like material that was like the foil that came in a pack of cigarettes, according to Marcel, some small Ibeams and “other stuff that looked very much like parchment that didn’t burn.”
Once he had identified the field, there was nothing more for Brazel to do, and he left the officers there. Marcel and Cavitt spent the rest of the day there examining the debris, checking for ground markings and trying to learn all they could. Remember, however, that Cavitt told Air Force investigators in the 1990s, he knew immediately what it was. He just never said anything about that to Marcel, if we are to believe him now. Rather than say it was a balloon and leave, he stayed with Marcel as Marcel attempted to identify the wreckage and spent hours on the Debris Field.
Marcel said, “We loaded up all this stuff in the carryall and we got back kind of late, but I wasn’t satisfied. I went back. I told Cavitt, you drive this vehicle back to the base [meaning the carryall] and I’ll go back out there and pick up as much as I can put in the car.”
According to what Marcel would later tell investigators, “We picked up a very minor portion of it [meaning the debris].”
With the car full and the sun setting, Marcel headed toward the base. Then, in what would become a controversial move, he drove to the house, arriving, according to his son, Jesse Jr., now a retired doctor and National Guard colonel with a tour in Iraq, about two in the morning. Marcel Sr., would later say that he was so impressed with the debris that he wanted his wife, and especially his son, to see it before he took it out of the base. He didn’t care that he had to awaken them.
Inside the house, they spread some of the debris on the kitchen floor, trying to fit pieces together as if it were some kind of gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Debris was spread from the stove on the left, across the floor to the sink and the refrigerator on the other side of the room.
Marcel, Sr. said, “I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what we were picking up. I still don’t know. As of this day I don’t know… It could not have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather balloon or experimental balloon… I’ve seen rockets… sent up at White Sands Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft, not a missile or rocket.”
Looking at the debris in the kitchen, especially the small, delicate I-beams, Viaud Marcel, Jesse’s wife noticed some sort of writing or symbols on them. Years later, Jesse Jr. would tell me that the writing was a deep purple and seemed to be embossed. One of the symbols resembled, in a very gross way, a seal balancing a ball on its nose.
When they finished looking at the debris, Marcel loaded it back into the car and drove it out to the base. He would later escort some of it to Fort Worth where he would be photographed with a weather balloon in General Ramey’s office. Marcel would later tell television reporter Johnny Mann that the debris in the picture was not the same stuff that he had found on the ranch.
Other Members of Blanchard’s Staff
But Marcel was not the only officer on Blanchard’s staff to be interviewed about the events of July, 1947. When I entered into the investigation, a surprising number of the top officers were still around. I had the chance to speak with many of them about the case, and almost all of them had some positive memories, unlike the pilots that Kent Jeffrey interviewed.
Joe Briley, who became the operations officer for the 509th, told me that in July 1947 he was a squadron commander and he thought that Lt. Col. Hopkins was the operations officer. Sometime later they swapped jobs. Briley said that he knew very little about the crash, though he did say that Blanchard had gone out to the crash site, which, with something of this importance would be expected by the commander.
Briley also told me that he had heard the stories about the flying saucer crash, “And then the story was changed and hushed up immediately. As soon as the people from Washington arrived.” This in direct contradiction to what Jeffrey heard from all those pilots that he interviewed.
Briley also said that he and Blanchard had been close friends and that Blanchard has been his instructor pilot years earlier when he went through flight school. He added, “In retrospect, I don’t think Butch [Blanchard] was stupid enough to call a weather balloon something else.”
But that was all Briley knew. He said that Blanchard had gone out to the site and that Blanchard was too smart to get wrapped up in the weather balloon mistake. Briley provides nothing of real importance to the investigation other than to suggest that Jeffrey’s interviews with the pilots might just have missed something important.
Patrick Saunders, in July 1947, was the base adjutant and a member of the primary staff. When I first interviewed him, he was just out of the hospital after a heart attack. He joked around about the little green men and suggested that he knew nothing of real value. The impression he gave, at that time, was that this flying saucer business was a joke.
Asked if he could remember any of the rumors and which of those might have some truth to them, he said, simply, "I can't specify anything." Saunders, it seemed, was not a witness to the story, or rather, would prefer that I believed that.
But later, when both UFO Crash at Roswell and The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell were published, he bought copies. In fact, he bought lots of copies, because, according to what he wrote on the first page of The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, that was the truth.