And note here that Johnson has suggested that Ramey’s aide was in the office. What I didn’t know then, and don’t know now, is if Johnson meant Captain Roy Showalter, who in 1947, was Ramey’s aide, or Colonel DuBose who some believed was Ramey’s aide but who was, in fact, the Eighth Air Force Chief of Staff.
Johnson told me, “Okay. And that's all I think were there. I took the two [do I need to point out, again, that this number is incorrect?] pictures and then they said- but that time they said, oh we've found out what it is and you know, it's a weather balloon and so forth. No big deal. I didn't press it. I accepted that. I was rather naive. I accepted it.”
KDR: Everybody did.
JBJ: I had no reason to come on then and say, 'oh, you've got to be lying."
KDR: Why couldn't your intelligence officer identify this?
JBJ: See, I was not pressing him.
KDR: Okay. So you went to Ramey's office, you saw the wreckage, you took the two pictures, you talked to Ramey, he said it's a weather balloon, you went back to…
JBJ: The Star-Telegramand gave them the wet prints of the thing. They wanted them right out. I went in and developed them and gave them wet prints. And I wrote…
KDR: And you don't know of any other photographs taken at the StarTelegramof Marcel when he first got there or anything like that?
JBJ: I never have heard that mentioned.
KDR: I wonder if they got the newspaper wrong. How about the other newspapers in the area like the Dallas…
JBJ: The Fort Worth Presswas the only other one.
KDR: The Dallas Morning News… JBJ: They would not have been over there. I don't think they came. I never saw any other pictures at that time. They wouldn't have been so anxious to get mine if they had had any others. Particularly if they had some earlier. When I got back there they… there were a whole bunch of people there. We didn't normally send wire photo directly. They had… in fact they went out of Dallas. And they had to send over… any time they wanted something they'd have to send over a portable transmitter. That's what they had done just while I had gone out to…
KDR: The Dallas paper did.
JBJ: No, the AP did. Then we put it right on the air from there. Because we were late… it was late in the afternoon. On the east coast it would have been deadline time. And that's why they wanted it… for the New York papers and all. That's why they were rushing me. This is towards the end of the day.
At this point, I haven’t figured out that Johnson took two pictures of Marcel, which were then cropped so that it didn’t look like the rawin target. When you see the whole picture, it’s quite clear what it shows. When Marcel looked at those pictures later, in the company of TV reporter Johnny Mann, Marcel said that wasn’t the stuff he had taken to Fort Worth. Those were of a weather balloon… but this is a discussion for another time.
JBJ: I don't know who that would have been. Let me look at my UFO file. I have Ramey squatting down. That's July 10 and then there's a consolidated news story right by it from news dispatches. “Fireballs Dim Disc over Texas.” And then I have the other one. On Sunday, July 6, the front page of theStar-Telegram: "Sky Mystery Mounts as More Flying Discs Are Sighted All over the Country." It mentions Texas and New Mexico and Washington and Oregon. But it does say New Mexico in that article. And then on July 7, Monday, on the front page again, ‘Flying Discs Cavort All over U.S. as Mystery Continues to Mount.’ Seven-nine [July 9] is my story [emphasis added] on the front page that was in earlier that day. That's when they debunked it. Oh, [paraphrasing] object found at Roswell was stripped of is glamour as flying disc by a Fort Worth Army Air Field weather officer late Tuesday… identified as a weather balloon. Warrant Officer Irving Newton from Medford, Wisconsin, weather forecaster at the base, said the object was a raywind target used to determine the direction of wind at high altitudes. Hurried home and dug up the remnants and so forth. It had been found three weeks previously by a New Mexican rancher, W. W. Brazel on his property 85 miles northwest of Roswell and thirty miles from the nearest telephone. He had no radio and so forth.
KDR: What we've got to do is find the name of the photographer who took the picture of Marcel. From what you're saying, it wouldn't be a StarTelegrampicture. You were the only reporter, photographer, who went out there.
JBJ; Yes, right.
We finished the interview with some discussion about other crashes that have been reported, for example those at Del Rio, Texas, and Kingman, Arizona. Johnson then asked if I could send him some material and I agreed to put something together for him. Naturally there were additional questions to be asked.
On March 24, 1989, I called Johnson again in an attempt to clarify some of the questions bouncing around. At the beginning of the call, and on tape, you hear me ask if he objects to my recording the conversation and he says, “No.”
I then ask for a narration, from start to finish, of what he remembered about the trip out to Ramey’s office and what took place inside.
JBJ: Okay. My name is initial J. Bond; it's also James Bond Johnson. I'm the original. I was a reporter and backup photographer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegramin July of 1947 after having served in the Air Corps as a pilot-cadet in World War II. On Tuesday, July 8, 1947,late in the afternoon, I returned from an assignment to my office in the city room of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which was both a morning and afternoon newspaper. My city editor of the morning paper ran over and said, "Bond, have you got your camera?" I said yes, I had it in my car. I had a four byfive Speed Graphic that I had bought recently and I kept it in the car because I was working nights and police and so forth and had it at the ready. He said go out to Gen. Ramey's office and… He said they've got something there and to get a picture. I don't now recall what he called it. He said they've flown something down… I don't think he called it something… he gave it a name because I was kind of prepared for what I was going to see. He said something crashed out there or whatever and they're- we just got an alert on the AP wire… though it might have been the UPI [He means the United Press; the UPI wasn't formed until 1958.]… that the Air Force or the Air Corps as it was called then is flying it down from Roswell on orders from Gen. Ramey. It would be located in his office. It was or would be by the time I got out there.
So I drove directly to Carswell and my recollections are now I went in and I opened my carrying case with my Graphic and I had brought just one holder with me with two pieces of the four-by-five film. [In an interview on December 23, 1990, Johnson told us he had two holders and four pieces of film. Black and white of course. I posed Gen. Ramey with this debris piled in the middle of his rather large and plush office. It seemed incongruous to have this smelly garbage piled up on the floor… spread out on the floor of this rather plush, big office that was probably, oh, 16 by 20 at least.
I posed Gen. Ramey with this debris. At that time I was briefed on the idea that it was not a flying disc as first reported but in fact was a weather balloon that had crashed. [Emphasis added.] I returned to my office. I was met by a barrage of people that were unknown to me. These were people who had come over from Dallas. In those days, any time we had-we normally bused any prints that we were sending to the AP, we bused them to Dallas to be transmitted on the wire photo machines. We had a receiver but not a sender in Fort Worth in those days. And no faxes.