Roswell Reflections: J. Bond Johnson, the Ramey Memo and Me
KDR: His aide was there? A little explanation might be necessary here. At this point in the investigation, I am unsure of the sequence of events, unsure of who really knew what, and unsure of what Johnson really knows. Later, as I continued the research, I would sort all this out. I would learn about the number of pictures taken, who took them, with the exception of the one picture of Newton, and have a better idea about the exact timing of events based on newspaper articles that provided a time sequence. In this interview, I’m still trying to sort things out so some of the questions seem to be redundant or simply but they eventually lead to the proper conclusions.
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 Star Telegram of 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 ray wind 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 Star Telegram picture. 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 by five 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.
So Cullum Greene, who was my city editor, said “Bond, give us a wet print,” which was not unusual. I normally operated on a very short time span at night or whatever… on an accident or a murder or whatever which I usually wound up taking pictures of. And, ah, he said, *Give us a wet print.” So I went in. They had brought up a portable wire photo transmitter and had it set up there in the newsroom. There was some assorted people around there.
KDR: Other reporters? JBJ: No, these were technicians that had come over in the time that it had taken me to drive out to Carswell and interview Gen. Ramey, get briefed and come back to the office. They had come from Dallas and set up this wire photo machine. They were people I did not know. They were AP personnel.
KDR: Did you talk to Gen. Ramey very long?
JBJ: No. There wasn’t much to say. As I remember, I probably wasn’t there more than 20 minutes which was not unusual. Generals are pretty busy. You get in and I didn’t have a whole lot to question him on. This was a very new thing because the very first article I saw in going back and researching it much later-the first story I found in the paper was July 6. I went in and developed those two [four] pictures and they were just identical almost. I came out with 8-by-10 wet prints and gave them to our photo people and they said thank you and by that time the telephone operator gave me a whole stack of messages that had come from all over the country. Everybody photo services like Blackthorn wanted exclusive photos and I could have retired very early.
I had those two pictures so I had nothing to sell. I printed those two and that was it. The picture-it was too late in the day as I remember it. They didn’t run it in the morning paper but they did run it the next afternoon and the following morning. Because the photographs I have now are-it ran on the morning of July l0 and the afternoon of July 9. It is entirely possible that I was briefed by the PIO. [Emphasis added.] So now I have a narrative with no interruptions by me. Just Johnson telling his story from the top, explaining that it was really no big deal because Ramey knew it was a balloon. He has told me that he wrote the article that appeared in the July 9 newspaper and by one count of the whole transcript, he has repeated this seven times.
On August 4, after a couple of letters, I again spoke with Johnson for 28 minutes. Unfortunately, the tape malfunctioned so that all I have of that conversation are the notes I took. I simply wanted to go over some of the things again and check the exact sequence of events. I wasn’t concerned. All the information, with one minor exception, was on all the other tapes. Johnson said that it was late in the afternoon when he went to Ramey’s office. He mentioned that he was mildly surprised that they were ready for him when he arrived. The front gate had been told he would be coming and there was a pass waiting there [He would later claim that this couldn’t be true because he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol and he had one of their stickers on his car so he had access to the base]. He was sent to Ramey’s office and shown the weather balloon. He said that it smelled of burned rubber and wondered why it was so important that they would bring it up to the general’s office.
Johnson said that it took him about 30 minutes to get to the office after he had been alerted. They had received a teletype (flash) message that the material from Roswell was on its way to Ramey’s office at Carswell. When he got there, the balloon was spread out on the floor, filling up one part of the room. He took his photos of it, spoke with the general, and then left.
Please note here that he said they had received a teletype message that the material was on the way to Ramey’s office and when he arrived the weather balloons were spread out on the floor. This will become important as we continue this long examination of the J. Bond Johnson episode.
But then the world shifted and Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera learned of J. Bond Johnson who they described as their new star witness. They interviewed him a number of times and now the story is different. Now, according to this version, Ramey didn’t know what it was in his office. Now Johnson believes that some of the real debris is mixed in with the balloon and rawin target debris. And now, Johnson was telling all who will listen that I have misquoted him.
In an article published in June 1990 issue of Focus, a newsletter created by Moore, Johnson saw the city editor, about 4 in the afternoon and was ordered out to the Fort Worth Army Air Field, later renamed Carswell. He said that it took him about twenty minutes to get there and since he was an officer in the CAP he only had to show his press pass to enter. He still stopped at the gate and he confirmed that he had to pick up his press pass there.
He went to Ramey’s office, which was different than his normal routine, and saw, in the middle of the room, the debris. He told Moore that there was an acrid odor of burned rubber. According to this version, Johnson asked Ramey what it was only to be told that Ramey didn’t know what the hell it was. He claimed to Moore and Shandera he hadn’t seen Marcel and because of that, the cover story was not in place at that time. Because of that, Johnson rushed back to the newspaper with his photographs.
https://scienceandspace.com/ufos/roswell-ufos-and-the-unusual-j-bond-johnson-the-ramey-memo-and-me-part-1/
https://scienceandspace.com/ufos/roswell-ufos-and-the-unusual-j-bond-johnson-the-ramey-memo-and-me-part-3/