In his affidavit, we get the same basic story, but this time Brazel takes Kellahin and Adair out to the field. Adair, the photographer, takes pictures, but none of them are ever used. This makes no sense when it is remembered that all seven pictures of the balloon debris displayed in Ramey’s office were printed somewhere. The pictures of the balloon in the field, with Brazel, and with Army officers around it, would be more important than the pictures in Ramey’s office, or the one of Mack Brazel wearing his cowboy hat and smoking a cigar.
The best available is that Kellahin did not stop at the ranch on his way down. He is mistaken about that. The lack of the photographs, and evidence about the location of Brazel on the afternoon of July 8 suggest it. The location that Kellahin gives is in error. The ranch was not close to Vaughn, and the debris field is not close to any road.
By the time Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell and were ready to begin reporting, some of the pressure was off. Ramey, in Fort Worth, explained that the material found in Roswell was nothing extraordinary. No longer was New York demanding pictures. In fact, several pictures had already been taken in Fort Worth.
The interview with Brazel occurred on the evening of July 8, according to the newspaper article in the July 9 edition of The Roswell Daily Record.Brazel was brought into Roswell by the owner of KGFL, Walt Whitmore, Sr. and taken out to the air base, not accompanied to Roswell by the Army as Kellahin suggested much later. Brazel was then escorted to the newspaper office to be interviewed by Kellahin, as well as a reporter for the Daily Record. The pictures transmitted, those of Brazel and George Wilcox, are ones that had been taken in the office for that purpose. Kellahin wrote his story, which appeared in the newspapers the next day.
With the story dead, Kellahin was ordered to return to what he had been doing. He left Roswell. Kellahin believed that nothing extraordinary had been found and there was no reason for the events to stick in his mind.
There are a couple of other comments to be made here. First, I’m surprised that the skeptics haven’t made more of Kellahin’s testimony. It fits into their balloon theory and adds the weight of a first-hand witness.
Second, Phil Klass takes me to task for not questioning the testimony of Robin Adair with the same vigor that I addressed the Kellahin’s testimony. He is, of course, right about that. Some of his assumptions are wrong. He asks why Adair, if he was in El Paso would have been authorized to charter a plane while Kellahin had to drive. The distances are roughly equivalent. The answer could be that the drive from El Paso covers some wild territory including mountains while the drive from Albuquerque does not.
Anyway, Klass is correct and I should have been tougher on the testimony offered by Adair. Clearly both men can’t be right about the circumstances, and I now suspect that neither are.
Finally, Tim Printy makes the case that these nearly fifty-year-old memories (when the witnesses were interviewed) are probably unreliable. As I mentioned, once Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell, Ramey had already introduced the balloon explanation. The story went from one that might have been the greatest story of the last thousand years to the misidentification of a weather balloon. The story probably didn’t stick in the minds of either man until we all began asking questions about it a half century later.
So, what do we do with this? Take the testimonies, compare then with the records available and decide from there where to go. I believe, based on my observations of Kellahin, on what I saw as I walked through his house, and on the affidavit he produced, that his testimony is largely confabulation. These are the things that he thought he would have done, these are the descriptions of the debris that he remembers, though it sounds as if it was lifted from the newspaper of 1947 (which he told me he had read just prior to the interview), and these are the actions he would have taken. Unfortunately, there are just too many problems with his story.
And here I need to say that I didn’t interview Robin Adair. I worked from the notes and transcripts of the interview conducted by Don Schmitt. All this means is that I didn’t have the opportunity to study Adair the way I did Kellahin. I don’t know what sources he might have used to refresh his memory or why his testimony is so much different than that of Kellahin.
But Klass was right. I should have been more skeptical about Adair. There are questions that should have been asked that were not.
In the end, we’re left with two conflicting statements, one that bolsters the balloon theory and one that suggests the alien ship but neither of which is reliable. To learn the truth, we need to go somewhere else.
Jesse Marcel and the Roswell UFO Crash
I have said it before and I’ll say it again. Nothing in the world of UFOs is ever easy or simple. It seems that almost any question will not have an easy answer and there are times when the more complex the answer the more it seems that someone is engaging in rationalization.
Take, for example, Lance Moody’s question about Jesse Marcel and the debris in Ramey’s office. He believes that since Marcel was quoted as saying that if he is in the picture it’s the real debris, the debate is over. Clearly the photographs of Marcel in Ramey’s office show him with the remains of a rawin target and a weather balloon (as seen here). But, is it really that easy?
Of course not. First, the quote originally appeared in The Roswell Incidentby Charles Berlitz and William Moore. This book was described by Moore as a disgraceful hodgepodge of fact and fiction. Moore, himself, offered three different versions of quotes by Marcel about the debris and the pictures, each changed to reflect the latest information. I think we can safely reject the Marcel quotes in that book because we don’t know what Marcel actually said to Moore, how Moore interpreted it, and how it might have been changed as new information was discovered.
Oh, if it was only so easy. But Stan Friedman got Marcel to sit down in front of the cameras for a documentary and Marcel, in that documentary, says the same thing. If he’s in the picture, it’s the real debris. If it is anyone else, then it is not.
So, we’re back where we started and Lance’s question takes on added importance because we see Marcel making the claim. How do we answer Lance’s question?
I could argue that the material on the floor in Ramey’s office was there before Marcel arrived, if the time lines have been reconstructed properly, and if that is true, then that couldn’t be the stuff that was found in Roswell. I could argue that Ramey was telling reporters, before Marcel arrived, that it was all a weather balloon and that the stuff on the floor reflected that explanation.
Yes, I know that some of this is speculative and there will be arguments about the validity of such a claim, but we do have some very good documentation and the timing of some of these things seems to be off when corrected for time zones. All this implies that the cover story was in place before Marcel could have arrived, if the take off time as given by Robert Skirkey in Roswell is correct… and please note that I am qualifying all this because we are dealing with old memories here and we have no documentation about the take off times.
Of course, I can point out that the press release written by Walter Haut, and clearly ordered by William Blanchard, gives us a window of times. I can suggest that none of this blew up until after the press release was put onto the various wire services and there would have been no reason to order Marcel, or anyone else to Fort Worth until then, but again. It is speculation.