So, here’s where we are at the end of the day. A number of men who were in a position to know about the crash gave family members information about it. They discussed bodies and they discussed a survivor. They gave descriptions of the crash. Their stories match, in a general way, but there are some discrepancies. We have virtually no documentation to support the tales of the crash, but we do have corroboration from a large number of others who were there.
In the end, it’s up to each person to decide what level he or she wants to assign this evidence. While the second-hand testimony, in most courts in most cases would not be allowed (though with Melvin Brown it could be considered a dying declaration), we have a body of first-hand testimony that would be allowed. Is it enough to “prove” that something extraterrestrial fell at Roswell? Given the numbers, I believe it is.
Chapter Three: Colonel Blanchard’s Staff
There are those who will tell you that the Roswell crash did not happen because pilots who were assigned to the base in July, 1947 knew nothing about it. They will suggest that if anything like that had happened, they would know about it. Kent Jeffrey, who at one time was convinced that the Roswell crash was of extraterrestrial origin, now believes that the mundane, that is a Project Mogul balloon, explains the incident and the strange debris. He believes this because many of the former pilots and officers of the 509th Bomb Group he interviewed told him that nothing had happened.
About this, Jeffrey wrote, in an article published in The MUFON Journal in June, 1997:
The 509th Bomb Group was based at Roswell in 1947. In September 1996, I had the privilege of attending the reunion of the 509th Bomb Group in Tucson, Arizona, as a guest of General Bob Scott and his wife Terry…
At the time of the 509th reunion, I had not yet seen all the pertinent 1948 military documents and still held an inkling of hope that there might be something to the Roswell event. Prior to the reunion, I had sent out over 700 mailings to members of the reunion
group in the hope of finding additional witnesses to the mysterious debris. The result was a disappointment — only two calls, neither of which was of any real help. Both of the men who called were former 509th flight engineers. One had had a very interesting UFO sighting from the ramp at Kirtland Air Force Base. The other recalled seeing a lot of extra activity around one of the hangars at Roswell near the time of the 1947 incident.
At the reunion in Tucson, I was introduced to several of the pilots who were at Roswell in 1947 and who promptly told me, in no uncertain terms, that the crashed saucer event never occurred, period. I did not get the impression at the time, nor have I ever since, that any of these men are engaged in some kind of incredible 50-year-long massive coverup or that they were putting on an act or facade to throw me off track…
The men who were at Roswell during July 1947 feel very strongly that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened and that the whole matter is patently ridiculous… To them, the crashed-saucer nonsense, along with all the hullabaloo and conspiracy theories surrounding it, makes a mockery of and is an insult to the 509th Bomb Group and its men.
One of the 509th pilots I met at the reunion, Jack Ingham, has since become a friend and has helped me considerably in contacting additional members of the group who were stationed at Roswell during the time of the incident. When I first met Jack in Tucson, he spared no punches in letting me know exactly what he thought about the crashed-flying saucer matter. Others at the reunion told me that if something like the crash of a UFO had really happened at Roswell, Jack Ingham would have known. Jack spent a total of 16 years with the 509th Bomb Group — February 1946 to July 1962. He retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in January 1971.
I have spoken with a total of 15 B-29 pilots and 2 B-29 navigators, all of whom were stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947. Most of them heard nothing about the supposed crashed-saucer incident until years later, after all the publicity started. The few men who did recall hearing something about the incident at the time of its occurrence said that the inside word was that the debris was from a downed balloon of some kind and that there was no more than "one wheelbarrow full." Not one single man had any direct knowledge of a crashed saucer or of any kind of unusual material. Even more significantly, in all of their collective years with the 509th Bomb Group, not one of these men had ever encountered any other individual who had such knowledge.
As Jack Ingham and others pointed out, the 509th was a very close-knit group and there was no way an event as spectacular as the recovery of a crashed-alien spaceship from another world could have happened at their base without their having known about it. Despite the fact that they, individually, may not have been directly involved with the recovery operation, and despite the pervasiveness of the "need to know" philosophy in the military, these men maintained that there was absolutely no way that something of such magnitude and so earthshaking would not have been communicated among the members of the group — especially within the inner circle of the upper echelon of B-29 pilots and navigators — all of whom had top-secret security clearances…
Most of the men of the 509th Bomb Group were primarily WWII veterans in their mid- to late twenties. (Colonel Blanchard, the commander of the group, was, himself, only 31.) Military regulations notwithstanding, human nature and common sense have to be factored into the equation. Such an occurrence — the most significant and dramatic event in recorded history — would surely have been discussed by these men, at least among themselves….
This is quite dramatic testimony and on the surface, it is quite persuasive as well as devastating. It overlooks one important point and that is that Colonel Thomas DuBose, chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force, told researchers that orders had come down from Strategic Air Command headquarters, then in Washington, D.C., and specifically from Major General Clements McMullen, that the officers were not to talk about this among themselves. DuBose told researchers during a video-taped August 1990 interview, “Nobody, and I must stress this, no one was to discuss this with their wife, me with Ramey, with anyone. The matter as far as we’re concerned, it was closed as of that moment.”
That does, explain, to an extent, why Jeffrey had been unable to find pilots who remembered the event as real. No one talked about it, not only because it had been classified, but because they had been specifically ordered not to. Such an order would change the equation as described by Jeffrey.
But the question that must be asked here is “What did the members of Blanchard’s staff say?” Not the pilots and navigators of this close knit organization and not the men who thought they were connected into the closed loop at the top, but the men who ran the organization. These were the men who were on the inside with Blanchard, and if anyone knew about it, these would be the men who did.
Blanchard had a full staff running from the A-1 (or S1 in ground Army staff rosters) or personnel officer, through an A-4, or supply, an adjutant and both a deputy commander and an executive officer. The men holding these positions would work directly with the commander. They would be responsible for parts of the investigation of the alien craft, if one had fallen.
It might be important to note that, along with the primary staff, there would be others such as the provost marshal who would have some knowledge of the crash. These were also staff officers but ones whose organization would not require a daily meeting with the commander, but who would have had to be on the inside to carry out the job.