Finally, and most telling is the information given to Schmitt near the end of his interview with Exon. Schmitt said, "We still have witnesses involved with Roswell that tells us they are sworn to secrecy or at least that's still their perception…they will go to their graves honoring their commitments."
Exon then said something that becomes important when all is considered. He said, "I'd do the same thing. You'd just be hazed and hassled by everybody who was trying to reconstruct the thing…"
Exon, then being "hazed and hassled" and probably having been reprimanded by someone inside the Air Force, was trying to subtly "rewrite" history. He was claiming that his statements were speculations, or there are those who are dismissing his statements as speculations. This simply isn't the case. Exon might not have liked it, the skeptics and the debunkers might not like it, but his words are on tape and taken in context. He let quite a bit of information out of the bag, probably not realizing what he was doing. It is clear from what he said, and from the corroboration that has been found that Exon knew the truth.
Chapter Five: The Media
Let’s now take a step back and look at the situation in Roswell from the point of view of the media, which means the radio and newspaper reporters who were there or who would arrive there over the several hours when the story was huge. We know about crash because Jesse Marcel decades later told friends about it, but the investigation continued after his revelation because there had been articles in the newspapers that showed Jesse Marcel with the debris from a weather balloon. Those articles also helped identify others who might have had some knowledge of what went on in 1947 such as Sheriff Wilcox, Mack Brazel and the officers at Eighth Air Force. In other words, this was not a single witness case with only some dim memory from that single witness, but a multiple witness case with newspaper articles as limited corroboration that something extraordinary had happened.
With the newspaper reporters controlled by July 8, meaning their access to the relevant people was limited as the Army moved those people around, it is clear that the Mack Brazel interview, reported in the Roswell Daily Record had been staged for the press. Brazel had already been on radio station KGFL with reporter Frank Joyce to talk about what he had found on Sunday, July 6, according to what Joyce told me during several interviews. Joyce was sort of the utility player for the station who played the music, did the commercials and gathered and read the news.
On Sunday, July 6, Joyce, according to what he told me, called over to the sheriff’s office to see if there was anything going on that might be interesting. The sheriff gave the phone to Brazel and according to Joyce, Brazel told him about the metallic debris he had found. Joyce said that Brazel seemed to be shaken by his discovery, which, if all he had found was scattered metallic debris, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Joyce claims credit for telling Brazel to call out to the base and while he might have suggested it, the sheriff and his fellow ranchers had already told Brazel to do that.
Joyce said that he had the impression that Sheriff Wilcox didn’t believe much of what Brazel said. Joyce said that Brazel told him everything on the telephone, which means that he talked about the Debris Field and there is a hint in this that Brazel might have seen alien bodies at some point. There was just a hint of this, however.
Joyce thought little about the story on Sunday but he reported it anyway. Then, on July 8, Walter Haut came into the station with a press release and said, “I’m giving you an hour on this,” meaning that he wasn’t going to give it to the other media outlets in Roswell until after Joyce had it for an hour.
Joyce read it over and then told Haut, “Walter, you shouldn’t send it out.”
Haut said that it was what Blanchard wanted, it was Blanchard’s idea, so it was going to be released.
Haut told me, in response to questions that he remembered little about the creation of that press release. Blanchard had ordered it and Haut prepared it, taking it in turn to each of the newspapers and radio stations. He didn’t know who was first on the list that particular day, only that he made it a habit to rotate the order so that no one got everything first and no one got everything last.
The information about the crash broke at 2:26 p.m., according to a story that a member of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, Frank John Reid, found in the Daily Illni. According to that information, the Associated Press put the story of the crash on the wire announcing that a flying disc (flying saucer) had been found in Roswell.
At that point, according to Joyce, his telephone went crazy. He claimed that a Colonel Johnson called him from the Pentagon, screaming at him and demanding to know who the hell told him to make the press release. Joyce finally told Johnson he was a civilian and there was nothing Johnson could do to him. Johnson snapped, “I’ll show you what I can do to you.”
Joyce’s response, according to what he told me, was to find the press release and the subsequent story so that he could prove to his boss he hadn’t made it up. That, of course, wasn’t necessary because Whitmore knew about the crash. And, later Joyce could not produce the press release. He did, however, have some of the teletype traffic about the case that he showed to various researchers.
Joyce said that the craft was about thirty-five feet in diameter and that it was all beat to hell. But he didn’t see it himself and Brazel, who might not have seen that, didn’t give him the description. My assumption is that he learned that from Johnny McBoyle, another radio reporter at another station.
Johnny McBoyle and KSWS
McBoyle was a reporter and station manager for KSWS in Roswell, the competition for KGFL. McBoyle, at some point, had tried to get out to the crash site. He called back to the station and was on the telephone with Lydia Sleppy, the secretary, dictating to her what he had seen. He apparently had some luck because he said that the object looked like a crushed dishpan and there were burned spots on the ground.
Sleppy, in an interview conducted in February, 1993, told me, “He just called me and said he had something for me to put on the line… He said that he had gone into the coffee shop in Roswell and this rancher walked in… He [the rancher] had been out on the ranch… when he came on this thing that was all smashed up…”
But Sleppy had another aspect of the story that to some makes little sense. She said that she was putting McBoyle’s story out over the wire, typing it as he dictated it “when the signal came on that this was the FBI and we were to cease transmitting.”
There are those who suggest there is no mechanism for the FBI, or anyone else for that matter, to interrupt the transmission. There was a switch that had to be flipped from transmission to reception and if the switch is in the transmit position it can’t receive. Sleppy, however, is positive that her typing out McBoyle’s story was interrupted. She stopped typing and then McBoyle told her the rest of the tale.
She insists that the FBI halted the transmission. Of course everyone assumes that the transmission was interrupted by the FBI using the teletype when it would have easier for them to use the telephone and order the halt. It would have interrupted the transmission without the necessity of somehow blocking the teletype machine. Sleppy said it was interrupted and a telephone call is both possible and likely.
Merle Tucker, who owned the station, and who was out of town when the crash happened, was trying to buy more stations for his fledgling network. He was suddenly concerned, given the nature of the story and the alleged halt order from the FBI that he was going to get into trouble with the government, which would have to approve his licenses and the agreements to purchase the additional stations. He talked to McBoyle about it, but by that time, McBoyle was reluctant to say anything. Tucker told me during an interview conducted in Albuquerque, that McBoyle told him he couldn’t talk about it.