J. Bond Johnson (JBJ): I took the picture with Gen. Ramey and the wreckage. Gen. Ramey was the commander of the 20th Air Force at that time. Or maybe not the 20th, maybe the 15th.
KDR: I think it was actually the 8th Air Force at that time.
JBJ: I think that's not right. [It was, in fact, the 8thAir Force.] I have the information anyway. I went to Texas around Christmas just before and went down to the newspaper and they turned me over to the library and I found and went back in the microfiche. I found the pictures. Interesting. I looked for the- they had tuned the negatives from those years over to UTA [University of Texas at Arlington] where you had contacted…
KDR: I found that out as well.
JBJ: They, interestingly, they could not find the negatives that I had taken. They had disappeared which is kind of interesting. [Actually, some of the negatives are on file at the library.] But of course I got copies from the paper. It ran in both the morning and afternoon editions.
KDR: That was the Star-Telegram.
JBJ: The Star-Telegram. The interesting things that you can get into, that you may know about… oh, those pictures have been used on a couple of TV shows… One was Star Trek… no, Star…In Search ofwhich Leonard Nimoy was the host of. [Johnson's photos were not used on In Search of] And I was sitting watching the TV and it popped up and showed this picture and oh, there's my picture. That kind of thing. Then another time it was on ABC. They had done a similar sort of thing and I was going to… Alan Lansbury puts together the In Search ofand he invited me over to a party at his house and this major was going to be there, the one from Roswell.
KDR: Marcel?
JBJ: Is he the one that got the…
KDR: He was the one that went out and picked up the material…
JBJ: Marcel, yes. He has a son. I saw the son interviewed on TV recently.
KDR: Yeah, that is exactly right…
JBJ:… My interesting part of this, having taken the picture and now going back and looking at the picture because I didn't have a copy of it… is that I don't know whether the Air Force was pulling a hoax or not. It looks like a kite. There was another thing that the gal from UTA gave me… there is a negative they have of Ramey looking at this ray-wind [sic] kite or something and it was printed in the paper a couple of days earlier. [In fact, this is one of the photos Johnson took. There is no evidence that Ramey was photographed with a Rawin target device earlier in the day or at any other time.]
KDR: Marcel is ordered off Roswell and they load the material into a B-29 and flew it to Fort Worth for Ramey to look at.
JBJ: That's when I got into it because the AP picked up that they were flying it down there. And I walked into the Star-Telegram. I was primarily a reporter but I had a camera, Speed-Graphic, that I carried in my car. I worked night police. I was a back-up photographer. The city editor came over and said, 'Bond, you got your camera?" And I said yes and he said, "Get out to General Ramey's office. They've got a flying saucer and they're bringing it from Roswell." And they were flying it down there… That we saw… that they came up with this weather-balloon thing as an added… that's my feeling. I never saw the real stuff.
KDR: Okay.
JBJ: Then they came out with that story almost simultaneously [about] the weather-balloon thing… And it's interesting that if it was a ray-wind [sic]or a balloon that the commander of Roswell wouldn't have known that and that…
KDR: The intelligence officer should have known that.
JBJ: That's right but they had to get some warrant officer to chop on it at Carswell. [Technically it was the Fort Worth Army Air Field.] What I want to find now is that negative and see what that picture is that happened to be in the paper just a couple of days sooner with Ramey looking at the weather balloon. I have one identified on the caption of Ramey looking at it and it was published in theStar-Telegram. That's from the Star-Telegram file that is in Arlington [Texas].
KDR: So you've been through the files at Arlington?
JBJ: No, no. I'm just talking to the same girl.
KDR: Okay.
JBJ: She sent me the list for all Ramey's photographs at the StarTelegram. At first I didn't know how to identify them. She sent a list of all the Ramey pictures but mine was not included.
KDR: She's doing the same thing for me because I had asked her about Ramey and that stuff. I said, “How about Marcel?" And she said that the other fellow didn't know about Marcel. So I thought maybe the picture… I've got a couple of questions that I need to ask you that might help me out later on. Is there any way that you could find out who would have been at the first press conference and taken the other pictures of Marcel?
JBJ: Never heard of that. They ran in the Star-Telegram? KDR: There are pictures of Marcel…
JBJ: I didn't know about that at the time and I can't imagine that I wouldn't have.
KDR: There's a picture of him holding the wreckage. There's a picture of Marcel. [This line of questioning was based on the information that Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz had published in their book about a decade earlier. According to them, Marcel was photographed in Ramey’s office with the real debris, but we now know that those pictures are of the weather balloon and rawin target. The pictures had been cropped to give a false impression.]
JBJ: You're sure that's not Ramey.
KDR: No, it's Marcel. It's Marcel holding the wreckage. [According to Berlitz and Moore] Marcel said later that if you see the pictures of him in Ramey's office it's the real wreckage and if you see Ramey and his aide, it's the balloon. Marcel knew there were two sets of pictures. That's why I suspected there were two press conferences. One when the stuff first arrived and one…
JBJ: When I went there, there was no press conference. I just went out and Ramey was there and the stuff was scattered… spread out on the floor in his office. He had a big office as most of them do. And he went over and I posed him looking at it, squatting down, holding the stuff…
KDR: Did you only take one picture?
JBJ: I took one. I had one holder. I took… they were essentially duplicates. I took two shots. I just had one holder. That's all I had with me. [He actually had three holders and took six photos. At the time of this discussion, neither Johnson nor I realized all of this. As I continued the search, I learned the truth about the number of pictures… but in the long run, none of this about pictures and holders was of overwhelming importance.]
KDR: So you used all your film.
JBJ: That was it. I got back at the newspaper. The newspapers had gotten excited. The AP had sent over a portable wire photo transmitter and I got a call from Blackthorn or whatever or all the newsphoto people. Everybody wanted an exclusive and I'd taken two…
KDR: That's what it says. I had Betsy [Hudon of UTA] looking for the pictures as well. She's sending me the list too. I figure someone is going to go to Fort Worth to look through them to find out if the stuff is really missing. I have seen- I've got one picture and it's a very bad copy of Marcel holding the wreckage. I've seen pictures of Ramey with the stuff. Look magazine did something in 1966 and talked about this; it showed Ramey holding the stuff.
JBJ: lt might be my picture. He was squatting down and looking at it. It was on the floor in his office. There were no other reporters there. I went in and I don't remember. I think there was some aide there.
KDR: His aide was there?
A little explanation might be necessary here. At this point in the investigation, I am unsure of the sequence of events, unsure of who really knew what, and unsure of what Johnson really knows. Later, as I continued the research, I would sort all this out. I would learn about the number of pictures taken, who took them, with the exception of the one picture of Newton, and have a better idea about the exact timing of events based on newspaper articles that provided a time sequence. In this interview, I’m still trying to sort things out so some of the questions seem to be redundant or simply but they eventually lead to the proper conclusions.