A number of books and documentaries have been done about Roswell since the late 1980s. One of the best was done by NBC's Unsolved Mysteries, for which both Jesse Jr. and I were interviewed. Some of the documentaries were by Roswell debunkers, much of whose research was often of the armchair-theorist variety. The debunkers had several basic rules, including: (A) Don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up, (B) What the public doesn't know I won't tell them, (C) Do your research by proclamation, because investigation is too much trouble, and (D) If you can't attack the data, attack the people.
I spent a great deal of effort throughout the years dealing with the false arguments of the naysayers. The problem is that we researchers have been racing the undertaker. Inevitably, we lose, though new witnesses do turn up sometimes. As the only Roswell researcher who has been in the homes of both Jesse Sr., who died in 1986, and Jesse Jr., I have been in a better position than most to deal with the criticisms, and nobody has ever accused me of being shy about expressing my opinion when I have done my homework.
For example, I published a very strong commentary in UFO Magazine about the sleazy treatment of the Roswell story by the late ABC journalist Peter Jennings on February 24, 2005. Not only wasn't it noted that I was a nuclear physicist, but, though they interviewed Dr. Marcel at greater length, they didn't bother to make mention of the fact that he was a medical doctor, a flight surgeon, a helicopter pilot, and serving as colonel in the Army in Iraq when the program was finally broadcast. Any reasonable person would agree that these facts are relevant to credibility. It was almost funny that the debunkers on the show, such as SETI specialists and Harvard psychologists, had their full titles presented, despite their lack of familiarity with the evidence.
Some people have asked, "So why did all those so-called witnesses go running to Friedman and Moore? Just to get on TV?" The fact of the matter is that they didn't. We had to work hard to find the witnesses. One critic was sure that Walter Haut, who had issued the famous press release of July 8,1947, had just made up the story and put it out on his own. Considering that the military group at Roswell was the 509th Composite Bomb Group, the most elite military group in the world, that is absurd. They had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They had hand-picked officers and high security. Some debunkers have foolishly claimed that Colonel Blanchard must have been sent to Siberia for putting out that stupid story. In actuality, he received four more promotions. At the time of his death of a massive heart attack in May 1966, he was a four-star general and vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force.
Another common question has been, "If security was so tight, how come Jesse Marcel was blabbing to a ham radio buddy and to UFO lecturer Stan Friedman?" That's not the case at all. Truth be told, years after my meeting with the TV station guy, I finally asked him what Jesse had actually told him about what happened. His answer was, "I asked him about the story, and he said that was something he couldn't talk about." He had read the story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, which mentioned that Jesse was from Houma. The most important witnesses, such as Jesse, Walter Haut, then-Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose, the rancher Mac Brazel, and others, all were mentioned in the contemporary press coverage. These men didn't ask for publicity, but once they got it, they could hardly deny their involvement. However, Cavitt, whom Moore and I located by 1980, wasn't mentioned in 1947, and kept avoiding telling anything useful until he gave false testimony to Colonel Richard Weaver about what he had found. Weaver's massive 1994 volume, The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, provided many official lies about the Mogul balloon explanation, as did the "crash test dummy" explanation of a second volume, The Roswell Report: Case Closed.
Frankly, I was pleased to be asked to contribute the foreword to Dr. Jesse Marcel Jr.'s book. The story needs to be told by someone of such high integrity as Dr. Marcel, someone who was so close to the long-ago events and people involved in them. He makes the people come alive.
The world has waited a long time for the inside scoop on Roswell. Truth is an excellent curative for false proclamations. The Roswell crashed saucer retrieval is one of the most important UFO cases ever, anywhere. We need more information from those directly involved, and this book provides a good deal of important new material.
Stanton T Friedman
fsphys @rogers. com
Introduction
When I was 11, my life took a strange and wondrous turn late one summer night in the kitchen of my family's modest little home in Roswell, New Mexico. It was on that night that my father, Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., showed my mother and me the debris from a mysterious crash that had occurred a few weeks earlier on a ranch about 75 miles northwest of Roswell.
As we examined the debris and carefully handled it, my dad's excitement was almost palpable. Though my father was the senior intelligence officer on a base that was home to the country's most closely guarded secrets, he was, to his family, a pretty laid-back guy, who took everything in stride. But on that night, I saw another side of him. It was a mixture of excitement and confusion, suffused with a sense of wonder that one just doesn't see in many grown men. His attitude, combined with the odd nature of the material itself, made a deep impression on me. This was clearly like nothing that had been seen on Earth before. But neither my dad nor I had any notion of the profound influence that the Roswell Incident would have on the popular culture in the coming years. We certainly had no idea that the specter of Roswell would haunt our family for decades.
By most official accounts, the crash that produced the debris had occurred in mid-June of 1947. On or about June 14, William "Mac" Brazel, foreman of the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, found a large amount of what some accounts described merely as paper, rubber, and foil garbage. But my father and I have always known that it was much more than that.
When Brazel reported to the local sheriff that he might have found some wreckage from a genuine flying saucer, the sheriff contacted the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF), where my father was stationed. My father and a Counterintelligence Corps agent, Captain Sheridan Cavitt, drove out to the ranch to examine and collect the property, and on July 8, the public information office at the RAAF announced that they had recovered the remains of a "flying disc." Not surprisingly, this caused a great stir in the media, and added fuel to the flying-saucer frenzy.
The excitement generated by the RAAF announcement was quickly deflected, however, when Brigadier General Roger Ramey at the Fort Worth Army Air Base ordered that the debris be sent to him for examination. He subsequently held a press conference, at which my father was present, and announced that the wreckage was from an errant weather balloon. My father was ordered to pose for a nowfamous photograph in which he was holding some weather balloon debris. After the general's announcement, the Roswell story was dead as far as the public was concerned. But it really wasn't dead; it was merely dormant, and remained that way for more than 30 years, until a nuclear physicist and respected UFO researcher named Stanton Friedman met with my father and discussed what was really found that night in New Mexico. When Friedman made his findings-and my father's statements-public, Roswell once again appeared on the public radar.
For my family, the story had never really died, although my father had been ordered to keep silent about the matter. Being a good officer, he remained silent for decades, even though he knew that there were big enough holes in the "official" stories about the crash and ensuing investigation to drive a truck through. To his dying day, my father was absolutely firm in his conviction that the material we examined was as he described it, "not of this Earth," and that the truth about Roswell had yet to be revealed to the public.