Our daughter MacKenzie told us that she remembers always being frightened that the aliens would come someday and abduct her and her older sister, Marissa. She said that when we used to drive to our condo in Big Sky to ski, she worried that aliens would come and get us. She went on to explain that she was most afraid when we were driving at night through a canyon to get to the mountain, where she feared the aliens could swoop down and take us without anybody seeing what happened, and no one would ever know what had become of us all.
She also said she was scared when we went to California for the premier of the TV movie Roswell. At the premier, my step-daughter Ashlee, who was 19 or 20 at the time, was in heaven with all the attention she was getting. While attending the festivities, we stayed in the Universal Hilton penthouse, an environment that, to the kids, must have been as wondrous as the Emerald City of Oz. I remember chuckling at Linda at the time, because the windows of our suite were all glass, and due to Linda being terrified of heights, she made us keep all the curtains pulled. As one would imagine, trying to block such a magnificent view from children who were in awe of it was a significant challenge.
The premier party was incredibly exciting to the girls, who had their first opportunity to see so many celebrities up close and in person. Linda, however, didn't have a clue who these people were, because she never watched television, and paid no attention to the "who's who" of the movie world.
My daughter Denice has always been interested in science fiction, and wasn't afraid as was MacKenzie. Similar to many young girls, she had dreams of being a movie star. When Paul Davids gave her a brief part in Roswell, she was on cloud nine. (If you look quickly and pay close attention, she is the waitress in the officer's club when Glenn Dennis meets with the mystery nurse.)
The producers had a limo pick us up to take us to the premiere, and MacKenzie, who was around 10 years old at the time, thought that perhaps the aliens had sent it. All through the showing, MacKenzie kept her eyes tightly shut, and wouldn't watch the movie because it scared her so badly. We couldn't even watch an innocent movie like ET because she was so afraid. She lived in fear that the "gray people," as she called them, would get her.
Even as an adult, she admits that some of that fear remains. MacKenzie told us that when we went to Roswell for the 50th anniversary of the crash, when she was 12, she was still apprehensive, fearing that it was a likely time for the aliens to show up. Furthermore, she did not like being around everyone wearing alien costumes, probably because she figured that a real alien could easily hide among them until the opportunity presented itself to snatch us up. She even hated all the alien paraphernalia everywhere you looked.
I was never really sure what her older sister Marissa felt, as she never seemed to make a big deal of the whole alien thing, one way or the other. When she was in high school and college, people would frequently ask her if she was related to Jesse Marcel. In fact, on one occasion, she was having dinner at her roommate's parents' house when the adults started talking about Roswell. She said that she just sat quietly and listened to the conversation, until finally her roommate said that the little boy they were talking about was Marissa's dad. At that point, she said, everyone turned and stared at her, which was pretty uncomfortable. They apparently hadn't connected the Marcel name, but once the secret was out, they all got very excited, and deluged Rissa with all kinds of questions. I can only imagine how that must have felt to her.
Aimee and Ashlee were typical teenage girls, whose primary reaction to their stepfather's fame, such as it was, could be summed up in one word: embarrassment. Similar to all teenagers, they wanted to stand out with their peers, but not for something their stepfather had done. I'm sure that they were the brunt of some teasing by the other kids nothing really serious or malicious, but cruel in the way that kids of all ages tend to be. As a result, they acted as though the whole UFO/ Roswell scenario simply didn't exist, and if one of their friends mentioned seeing me on television, they would change the subject as quickly as possible.
I'm certain that the family's immersion in the UFO controversy had its effect on how we looked at other things as well. For example, I can remember that when we lived in our 1880s mansion in Helena, Rissa and Linda told me that they were always seeing an unexplainable green light floating around inside the place. Many strange things happened in that house, but we always thought it was the ghost of Mrs. Tatum, the lady who had first lived there. But maybe MacKenzie was closer to knowing the real source after all. We'll probably never know, but it was good for more than one interesting conversation at family dinners!
One day, sometime in the middle '70s, I was driving home with my sons Jay and John, and we all saw a strange object a little ways south of where we were, flying from the east to the west against a fairly strong prevailing wind. We immediately jumped out and stood in the yard to get a better look. Even though it obviously had to be under its own power to fly against the wind, it made virtually no sound. The total time it was visible was less than half a minute, and we were all completely awed by what we had seen. After it had passed out of sight, the three of us went into the house and independently drew pictures of what we had just seen. When we compared our drawings, each one looked virtually identical to the others: Each drawing was of a classic disc-shaped UFO (though John's drawing was really kind of a teardrop-shaped blob). Considering that he was only six or seven years old at the time, I thought he did a pretty good job of capturing the image. Needless to say, we were all excited by the experience. I had actually forgotten about the event until they reminded me about it, and I had been saying for years that I had never seen one of those things. Memory is a strange thing. Something that you think never existed comes back in a flash. Maybe some part of me was trying to suppress it for the last 30 years or so, though I'm certain that some people would proclaim that I had been abducted, and that the "little green men" had eras ed my memory. I figure, if that's what they find most entertaining…
Jay and John were always interested in science fiction, and loved to look through our telescope at the moon and stars. In fact, all the kids enjoyed the times we spent on cloudless nights, searching the heavens. The boys and I liked flying the radio-controlled planes and helicopters we built, and because we have usually lived in areas without power poles, we had plenty of opportunities to fly them in the fields. They loved to make bottle rockets and send them aloft in the foothills around our house, to the never-ending amazement of their friends. They also enjoyed creating electrical circuits, helping me build Tesla coils, and "inventing" all kinds of electrical circuits, some of which actually did something useful (or at least entertaining). I knew they were having a good time, and tried to keep a fairly close eye on what they were creating (especially because Linda pretty much lived in fear that they would blow up the house or set it on fire-which, thankfully, they never did, though they sometimes came closer than I chose to tell her).
Even as interested as the boys were in all things scientific, they tended to feel uncomfortable with the UFO aspect of our lives as they were growing up. As we all know, young boys will use anything they can find to get a leg up on the other boys in their crowd, and Jay and John ended up being the target of a lot of teasing, simply because there was something about them that differentiated them from their friends-namely, that their dad had seen and handled a UFO. Tease a kid enough, especially about his parents, and he will either start to avoid you or get right in your face, sometimes with a fist. I don't think the boys got into that many fights over my UFO connection, and probably wouldn't have told me if they did. They were, for the most part, well-behaved and good natured, but as do all young boys, they lived by a code that demanded that they keep some things secret from Mom and Dad. Besides, I know all too well how even the telling of an unhappy event can make it seem even more real and more important, and feeling embarrassed about your dad is not something to which a kid wants to give any more substance.