Finally they turned back toward Roswell. Adair didn’t have a good idea of where, exactly, they had seen the crash sites. He mentioned two of them, one with gouges in the ground and one that was covered with tall grass that was difficult to see. One of them looked as if something had set down hard and bounced back into the air so that there wasn’t much to see on the ground. Two crash sites that he thought might have been oriented from the northwest to the southeast, but he wasn’t sure.
In Roswell, at some point, he found Kellahin, and they both made their way to the Roswell Daily Record. According to the newspaper of July 9, special arrangements were made to transmit pictures from Roswell to the AP. According to the article, “Dispatch of pictures of W. W. [Mack] Brazel, who discovered a purported flying disk on the Foster Ranch, northwest of Roswell, was made on the instruments shown in the picture. The instruments were set up in The Record office last night and the pictures sent out by wire about six o’clock this morning.”
Were these the pictures that Kellahin talked about in his interview? The ones of Brazel, in the field, with the balloon and several Army officers? Pictures that could end the controversy here and now?
No. The reality is that no pictures of Brazel on the ranch, with the debris and with Army officers has ever surfaced and this suggests that such pictures were never taken. Had they been taken, they would have been printed somewhere, and someone, by now, would have found them. We’ve managed to find every picture that is of relevance to the case, but none of Brazel in the field with the balloon.
Yet, we do have documented evidence that Brazel was photographed and that pictures were transmitted from Roswell. In a story that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record dated July 9, and entitled, “Harassed Rancher who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It,” we learn more about the picture. And, it confirms some of the other information that we have gathered about the case.
According to that story, “Brazel was brought here late yesterday by W. E. Whitmore of radio station KGFL, had his picture taken and gave an interview to the Record and Jason Kellahin sent here from the Albuquerque bureau of the Associated Press to cover the story. The picture he posed for was sent out over the AP telephoto wire sending machine specially set up in the Record office by R. D. Adair, AP wire chief sent here from Albuquerque for the sole purpose of getting out his picture and that of sheriff George Wilcox, to whom Brazel originally gave the information of his find.”
For those wondering, one picture of Brazel, smoking a cigar has surfaced. He’s wearing his cowboy hat. It is credited as an AP Wirephoto, so it must be the picture sent out over the wire. It was not taken outside and it does not show any of the debris that Brazel found. It’s just a picture of Brazel, smoking.
The Press in Fort Worth
With these stories and pictures the interest shifted from Roswell to Fort Worth, Texas. Brigadier General Ramey had ordered Major Jesse Marcel from Roswell to Fort Worth and to bring some of the debris with him. Since Ramey commanded the Eighth Air Force, no one in Roswell could do anything other than comply.
In interviews conducted later, including those with Colonel Thomas DuBose, Warrant Officer (later major) Irving Newton, Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter J. Bond Johnson, and, of course Marcel, the sequence of events in Fort Worth could be deduced. Here we are only interested in how the media handled the situation.
According to interviews conducted with Johnson over a period of several weeks, he was the man who took six photographs of the debris in Ramey’s office and he was among the first to interview Ramey. Later he would claim that only he had interviewed Ramey, but other newspapers quoted their own reporters. When Johnson was there, no other reporters were. They could have come in later, or, more likely, most of these other interviews were done over the telephone, a practice that is even more common today.
According to the original interview, Johnson was in the office when his boss asked if he had his camera. He said he did and the man told him to get over to General Ramey’s office. “They’ve got a flying saucer and they’re bringing it up from Roswell.”
Johnson drove out to the base and was taken to Ramey’s office where there was wreckage scattered on the floor. According to what Johnson told me, the debris was flimsy stuff and smelled of burned rubber. Ramey told him that it was just a weather balloon that had crashed.
Johnson took six pictures that afternoon. Two of them showed Marcel crouched by the debris, two showed Ramey, and the last two showed Ramey and Dubose. Johnson didn’t know it then, but one of the pictures would become extremely important when UFO researchers began to reexamine the Roswell case (see the Ramey and the Smoking chapter).
Having used all his film, having learned what the debris was, Johnson returned to the newspaper office to develop the pictures. Just before midnight, long after Ramey had appeared on radio station WBAP in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to explain that the mystery was solved by a weather balloon, after another of his officers told the FBI that it was a weather balloon, and nearly two hours after ABC News “Headline” edition had also reported the solution, Johnson put his pictures on the INS photowire.
There was one other picture taken in Ramey’s office that night. Warrant Officer Irving Newton was photographed crouched by the same debris that appeared in the Johnson photographs. It is believed that the picture was taken by someone at the base rather than a reporter and I have suggested that was the Public Relations Officer, Major Charles Cashon.
Johnson said, originally, that he didn’t spend much time in Ramey’s office. He took the pictures, talked briefly to Ramey and DuBose but either said nothing to Marcel, or Marcel didn’t answer any questions. Marcel would later say that Ramey had told him to keep his mouth shut. Ramey certainly controlled the tone of the meting.
That night, according to what Johnson said originally, he wrote the article that appeared the next day in the newspaper. Johnson, in an interview with me, said, “Seven nine [July 9] is my story on the front page.”
That article, and that statement have become important as the story developed. According to the article, “After his first look, Ramey declared all it was was a weather balloon. The weather officer [Newton] verified his view.”
With that, the importance of the Roswell find was destroyed. For three hours the world believed a flying saucer had been found. Then Marcel arrived in Fort Worth, Johnson arrived at Raemy’s office, and the identity assigned to the material in Ramey’s office was established. Not a flying saucer as reported, but a weather balloon.
Confusion about Ramey and Marcel
Back in 1990, having spent a couple of hours talking to Johnson on the telephone, I reported what I had learned. I admit a little confusion, but it was borne, not of what Johnson was telling me then, but of what others had reported earlier. William Moore, who co-authored The Roswell Incident, had quoted Marcel as saying, “There was half a B-29-ful outside. General Ramey allowed some members of the press in to take a picture of this stuff but were not allowed far enough into the room to touch it. The stuff in that one photo was piece of the actual stuff we had found. It was not a staged photo. Later, they cleared out our wreckage and substituted some of their own. Then there allowed more photos. Those photos were taken while the actual wreckage was already on its way to Wright Field. I was not in these.”