But Todd’s letters to Marcel, Jr. were certainly not reasonable. Todd, as was his habit, turned nasty in his communications with those who didn’t agree with him. In a letter to another researcher, Todd wrote, “I have already been told that he [Friedman] and Randle both have been slandering me at every opportunity. Apparently these two shameless liars…” and this is one of his less inflammatory statements. Of course it is not true. I rarely discussed Todd with anyone.
About Jesse Marcel, Jr., he wrote, “It should be noted that Jesse Marcel, Jr., now conveniently claims his father told him he had some ‘bootleg’ flying time which presumably wasn’t documented [which, of course, is the definition of bootleg time]… Given Major Marcel’s numerous other lies, and the younger Marcel’s obvious and understandable desire to salvage his father’s credibility, there is no reason to take the younger Marcel’s claim seriously.”
You might say this is still fairly tame, though he does manage to call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar and suggest that Jesse Jr. is lying as well.
But then we have a May 10, 1996 letter from Todd that begins, “Dear Junior,” meaning Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr. Not exactly the kind of salutation you put on a reasonable letter to a physician.
Todd then wrote, “The spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors in your ‘960420' letter didn’t surprise me, given the level of ‘intelligence’ you’ve demonstrated in the past. The disgraceful obscenities didn’t surprise me either, given the scum with whom you’re known to associate. Likewise, the fact that you actually bothered to send me a letter, telling me that your letters are a waste to me, is a clear demonstration of the cutting edge ‘logic’ I’ve come to expect from the hysterical little girl who has come to be know as ‘the alien spaceship doctor.’”
I will note two things about the above. It explains why Todd didn’t get responses to some of his letters, and on this one, Jesse Marcel, Jr. wrote, “I did not send a letter with this date [960420 which I suppose it Todd’s convoluted dating system for April 20, 1996] to him.
Todd was often nasty, didn’t believe anyone had the analytically ability that he did and believed all his conclusions to always be right. There was no room for disagreement in his world. If you did, you became an enemy, at best.
I mention all this, because it was Todd who worked so hard to destroy the reputation of Jesse Marcel, Sr. believing, I guess, that if Marcel crumbled, then the whole of the Roswell case crumbled. Had Marcel been the lone voice, that would have been true, but Marcel was backed up by every officer on Colonel Blanchard’s 509thBomb Group staff with a single exception. Marcel had lots of company.
Moseley, who knows most of this about Todd, still believes the Mogul balloon story despite mounting evidence to the contrary and Moseley still believes that Todd contributed something to the case with his release of Marcel’s entire military file. But Todd drew conclusions from the slightest information and proved time and again that he had no knowledge of how the military worked. Moseley has almost none himself, despite the fact that his father had been a major general and one time the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army (when major generals held that post).
Moseley clings to the ridiculous Project Mogul answer for the Roswell case while many others admit now that Mogul is not the answer. But the real point here is that Moseley still believes that Marcel lied to Pratt when the evidence isn’t as cut and dried as he thinks it is. He relies on what Karl Pflock wrote about Marcel and Pflock relied on Todd and Todd simply didn’t understand how the military works. Todd believed that everything in the record was totally accurate and when it disagreed with what a witness said, then the witness must have been lying.
I have sent Moseley another letter asking him the same question again. If we grant Charles Moore the benefit of the doubt when the records clearly show them in conflict with his testimony, then don’t we owe the same courtesy to Jesse Marcel, Sr.? All of these discrepancies are over relatively minor points and can be explained by the fog of time and the frailty of memory. I still await his answer.
SETI and Nez
I’m not a big fan of SETI but only because it seems to have made some early assumptions in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence that might be too human in nature. That is, originally, they were looking for radio signals at what the called the water hole or the most common radio frequencies because they believed that any advanced civilization would be using radio and looking in the same place. I can think of all sorts of things that are wrong with that assumption, but hey, you had to start somewhere. Yes, I know they have now expanded beyond that and that they can search huge portions of the sky fairly rapidly.
As one who supports the idea that some UFOs represent alien visitation, I was always a little annoyed at the SETI attitude that UFOs had nothing to do with what they were attempting to do. That is, contact an extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m not saying they should have signed up UFO supporters but they should have made a pass at that evidence in case there was something relevant to their search.
But, of course, I supported the idea behind SETI because if they were successful, then one of the reasons to reject UFOs as alien would be eliminated… just as the discovery of extra solar planets have eliminated one of the reasons.
Given all this, I was horrified to learn, according to KPHO-TV in Phoenix, that Brad Niesluchowski, had resigned as a teacher from the Highley Unified School District because he had signed up the district’s computers to participate in the SETI@home project (and for those of you who don’t know what it is, Google it).
A spokeswomen for the district said that they would support cancer research but not something like the search for “E.T.” She pointed out that it was costing the district about a million a year to support the program because it kept the district’s computers working all the time which upped their utility fees and caused additional wear and tear on the computers causing more repairs and replacements.
Okay. Fair enough. If the fellow had done this on his own, and it was costing the district that much, then, hey, he made a bad call… except the software used to download the program had been authorized by a previous school administration.
Wait a minute. He didn’t decide for himself to do this. He got permission… then why is he out of a job and why is there now a police investigation? And this has been going on for ten years.
The SETI folks see him as a hero. I have to agree. Seems to me that someone in the school administration didn’t see that it was going to cost so much (and I wonder if it really does) but Nez, as he is known in the SETI world, got authorization to do it. Shut it down if you must but don’t punish the guy for something he was given permission to do.
The Best UFO Headline Ever
I’m not sure why I haven’t posted this before. It is the best UFO headline ever. It is something right out of a science fiction movie.
It refers, of course, to the sightings that took place in July 1952 over Washington, D.C. The Air Force eventually claimed that these sightings were the r e s u l t o f a t e m p e r a t u r e inversion but the problem was that there were sightings on the ground, sightings in the air, radar sightings, and a rather “hairy” intercept by jet fighters. In fact, f i g h t e r s w e r e scrambled on a number of occasions during the sightings, and yes, the fighters got a radar lock on the objects and the pilots saw them in the air.