So, here we now have Cavitt saying that he had gone out on a balloon recovery, that he might have gone out with Marcel, but he wasn’t sure, that he was involved in the recovery in early July, and that he might have turned over some of the recovered material to Marcel.
Weaver’s next question was, “What do you think it was when you recovered it?”
“I thought it was a weather balloon.”
So Cavitt was able to identify it immediately. To me, Weaver’s next question, given the history of the case, should have been, “Did you communicate this rather important piece of information to Marcel?”
Instead, he asked, “Were you familiar with weather balloons at the time?”
And Cavitt said, “I had seen them.”
It has always been an article of faith that the Mogul balloon array was unusual enough that it could stump the people who found it. Because it wasn’t a single balloon, but many, with many radar reflectors and long strings connecting everything, people who were familiar with weather balloons might not recognize them as such, though why they wouldn’t is a mystery to me. And Cavitt claimed that he did. More importantly, he didn’t bother to tell Marcel what it was.
What we now know is that Marcel said that Cavitt had gone out there with him, but Cavitt had made it clear that he had not. We know that Marcel was right on that point, given Cavitt’s new information that Marcel might have been with him. It isn’t Marcel vs Cavitt here, but Cavitt vs Cavitt.
We can go further. Remember Cavitt said, “There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it.”
Cavitt said he was with Rickett. Here is what Rickett said about that in a taped interview conducted by Don Schmitt, “I [meaning Rickett], Marcel went back out there that same afternoon. This time they had some security people from the Provost Marshal’s office out there.”
Just so we have this straight, because it could be argued that Cavitt had not seen the security out there because it was put there after he had been in the field, Rickett said, “Cavitt and I came back together and I’m not sure if Marcel came with us… it was being protected…” So, Rickett was out there more than once, he was with Cavitt on, at least one of those trips, and Rickett saw the guards.
Later, to confirm this, Rickett said, “On the road we drove on, [there were] MP s standing there…”
The argument here is between Rickett and Cavitt. Cavitt said no guards and Rickett said guards. Others, such as Judd Roberts, William Woody and even C. Bertram Schultz said there were checkpoints along the dirt roads leading off the main highways to the north and west. This means that Cavitt was wrong on that point as well.
If we look at his description of the debris that he claimed he picked up, we find that it doesn’t match Project Mogul. There weren’t bamboo sticks in it. Balsa wood, yes. His description of the crash site matches no one else, including that supplied by Bessie Brazel, daughter of Mack, and who told investigators what she, her father and her brother Vernon, had seen. She also said that they picked up the debris so there was nothing in the field for Cavitt to see. But that is something to examine in another post.
What this means is that the testimony given by Cavitt is not very reliable. Clearly he was saying to Weaver what Weaver wanted him to say. Clearly, he was telling me things that were not consistent and that have since been proven false. He even proved to me that his statement that he wasn’t in Roswell was wrong because he showed me copies of his orders assigning him there.
This means that we must look at the statements provided by Cavitt and compare them with the statements of other witnesses. Do they fit into the picture, or it is Cavitt standing alone, making statements that are not corroborated by others. With Cavitt, even the man who worked directly under him, is contradicting him and as I noted, Cavitt doesn’t even agree with Cavitt.
While this doesn’t prove that Roswell involved extraterrestrial contact, it does show the extraordinary effort the Air Force went to in 1947 and later in 1994 to prove that it was just a weather balloon (yes, but Mogul was made up of weather balloons). And it shows that the testimony of Sheridan Cavitt, like so many others, isn’t completely reliable.
Friedman’s Black Sergeant
(Note: I asked Paolo Martinuz for permission to use the material he sent me and he granted it. The original emails were sent from Stan Friedman to Paolo.)
In February 1989, I arranged for Don Schmitt and me to meet with Bill Brazel Jr. (as seen in the picture… Randle, Brazel and Schmitt) in Carrizozo, New Mexico, to discuss his memories of picking up fragments of debris from an alien spacecraft crash. I fully expected to learn that the testimony that had been attributed to him by others to be inaccurate and nowhere nearly as spectacular as reported. To my surprise, he confirmed that he had picked up the debris, which he described in terms that suggested something other than the terrestrial, that he had kept that debris in a cigar box that suggested there wasn’t much of it and it wasn’t very large, and that, finally, Air Force officers and enlisted men from the Roswell Army Air Field eventually visited him and confiscated it.
The substance of that interview was reported first in UFO Crash at Roswell and later in The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. There is one line in that interview that sparked controversy in the early 1990s. Brazel, in describing what happened to the material, said, “I still am not really sure, but I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong. A real nice guy. Now he had a sergeant with him that was real nice. And I think there were two other enlisted men.”
Stan Friedman used the same testimony in his Crash at Corona. Though he does not provide attribution, it is clear that he is quoting from the interview that Don Schmitt and I had conducted.
Friedman wrote that Brazel said, “I’m almost positive that the officer in charge, his name was Armstrong. A real nice guy. Now he had a [black] sergeant with him that was real nice. And I think there were two other enlisted men.
Jerry Clark (seen here), writing in the International UFO Reporter, notes this change. Commenting on Crash at Corona, Clark wrote:
In other ways it [Crash at Corona] is a flawed and disturbing work, an object lesson in the consequences of uncritical claimant advocacy.
The most chilling example of this appears on page 85 [hardback] where we find these words attributed to Bill Brazel, son of Mac [sic] Brazel, the rancher who discovered the debris. Brazel reports four Air Force men called on him after learning that he had kept some of the material. One was an officer named Armstrong. “He had a [black] sergeant with him,’ the book reports, quoting Brazel. The same quote, taken from the same interview (conducted by Randle and Schmitt), appears on page 130 [paperback] of UFO Crash at Roswell, but without the bracketed word.
Brackets are placed inside quotes when a writer or editor wishes to clarify meaning or insert commentary or correction. Brackets are not supposed to be used, as they are here in the Friedman/Berliner book, to put words into someone’s mouth especially when those words state something contrary to fact. Not only has Brazel never said the sergeant was black, he emphatically denies it.