So What’s the Story, Really?
The accounts dating to mid-June 1947 inevitably interfere with the more common Mac Brazel timeline: did Brazel discover the debris on June 14 or two weeks later? At this juncture, there may no longer be an answer to that.
Certainly, the “thunder” recollections of Dan Wilmot and others (including Brazel himself, who heard odd thunder early in July) are intriguing. William Woody’s account is dramatic and reasonably detailed. The stories suggest that something anomalous—perhaps natural, perhaps not—occurred in that July sky.
But how, then, do the July thunder incidents fit with Brazel’s mid-June discovery of debris? If the June 14 date is accurate, Brazel’s discovery, taken in concert with recollections by Brazel and others concerning early July, suggest that the crash was not a singular event, but part of a pattern that continued for weeks.
Substitute “ongoing research “for “pattern” and you are forced to consider that the Army had invested enough in its work that some quick subterfuge was called for. And in acting quickly, Army personnel inadvertently confirmed the deceptive nature of the official explanation. Let’s think about Major Marcel.
Under ordinary circumstances, he would not have touched the debris, let alone filled his staff car with it. Physical evidence pertinent to a military-related incident is very like the often-fragile physical evidence of a crime. One basic rule that first-responders must follow is observe and record but do not touch.
And for heaven’s sake, don’t move anything. And if you’re foolish enough to do that, do not remove it to another location. But Marcel did the first two things, and, as we’ll see, probably the third, too.
Why would he have acted so recklessly? Because he acted under orders, and when he stood looking at the debris, recklessness didn’t matter. Only an explicit order would have been sufficient for Marcel to lay a fingertip on any of the wreckage. Logic suggests that if he were ordered to do that, he also had been ordered to get rid of as much of the stuff as he could. (Otherwise, why touch it at all?) Someone back at RAAF—perhaps encouraged by Washington—wanted the crash debris to get “gone.” The early-period Roswell chronology is tangled, and some of the details curl back on themselves. If the seminal portion of the Roswell tale were a script or a novel, an editor would send it back for a lot of rewrite. What appears indisputable is that something (or things) fell to earth near Roswell in the summer of 1947. What appears possible, if not downright probable, is that things dropped from the sky over a period of days and even weeks. Chronological details are naturally very important, but today we are more concerned with the what than with the when.
In a bit of a twist that many casual Roswell enthusiasts are not aware of, the whole story dropped out of the newspapers and off the cultural radar very shortly after those first reports. The Army released an amended story, the local newspaper abandoned the saucer angle, and local folks just got on with their lives. But diminished public interest hardly means that Washington and the Army no longer paid attention to Roswell.
Three explanation scenarios are likely, and each rests on the assumption that the weather-balloon tale was intentional deception. Assuming further (as Mac Brazel did) that the debris was earthly in nature, the Army covered up an American mechanism far more unusual than a weather balloon—perhaps the aforementioned nuclear-monitoring device. Alternatively, the crashed object had been sent by a foreign power, to spy on test areas and, at the very least, embarrass the U.S. military.
The third possible explanation abandons the “earthly” mindset to invoke the cosmos, suggesting that the crashed object was neither American, Soviet, nor human. It was extraterrestrial.
It is the third explanation, of course, that has inspired some seventy years of ET talk, with tales of one or more disabled saucers taken virtually intact, and undersized alien corpses spirited off to secret labs. Extrapolated from that are claims of saucers secretly reverse-engineered by American tech experts, plus accounts of incredible weaponry, human collusion with aliens, human-alien breeding programs, and the notorious Roswell “alien autopsy” (see chapter fifteen).
A discussion of alien corpses brings us back around to the prominent UFOlogist Kevin Randle. Despite his unfortunate, later-severed collaboration with a fraudulent researcher (see chapter 1), Randle shook off the embarrassment and redoubled his efforts to get at the truth of Roswell. During the 1980s he interviewed many ex-military personnel and Roswell locals who claimed to have seen tiny corpses. Subsequent investigation by Randle revealed that those accounts were, in his words, “not based in reality.” Of course, the existence of a discredited witness, or even discredited multiple witnesses, says something only about the witnesses’ spurious accounts, and nothing at all about whether the alien-body notion is true or false. So Randle kept at his research and found Frankie Rowe, a Roswell resident who had been a little girl in 1947. When Randle interviewed her in detail in 1993, Rowe recalled that her father, a firefighter, returned home from a call with a tale of a crashed “spaceship,” small body bags, and one survivor, a child-sized humanoid with copper-colored skin.
Randle located other secondhand witnesses who, like Rowe, had been kids in 1947 and learned of the small bodies from parents. Firsthand accounts are always best, of course, and Randle eventually located a woman able to tell just such a story. Although elderly when Randle got to her in 1994, Anna Willmon recalled with reasonable clarity how she and her husband came upon wreckage near Pine Lodge Road, about twenty miles from Roswell. The Willmons discovered two corpses sprawled near a silvery disc. Anna Willmon recalled the bodies as being the size of small five-year-olds, with gray-brown skin.
Other civilians and former military personnel discovered by Randle and other researchers after 1990 spoke with varying degrees of credibility. The numbers of alien bodies varied (usually two, three, or four). Not every witness claims to have seen a living alien. Descriptions of skin color, eyes, attire, and other details vary. Employment logs and service records confirm that many of these witnesses were, or could have been, where they claimed. None of the people kept diaries or wrote letters describing their experiences, and the years had taken people that could have corroborated some of the stories. “After-the-fact” eyewitnesses, such as people that studied metal fragments collected from the crash site, have been turned up, too. Documentation of their work often disappeared, or became classified and inaccessible. Many such witnesses agree that the military took special care to prevent leaks.
The Twining “Flying Discs” Memo
Publicity about the proximate Kenneth Arnold and Roswell incidents brought a pucker to the brows of many in Army Air Forces high command. Whether from a serious desire to discover the origins of “flying saucers” or to protect its own secret tests, the fact is that the AAF’s heightened interest in unidentified flying objects created a receptive climate for what came to be called the Twining Memo. According to this memo—discovered, with other relevant documents, in the National Archives in 1985 by UFOlogists Stanton Friedman and William Moore—Gen. Nathan Twining had been dispatched to the AAF base at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1947 to study the retrieved remains of a crashed object found twenty miles northwest of Socorro. The general arrived at Alamogordo on July 7, to look at the Socorro debris and meet with AAF Chief of Staff Carl “Tooey” Spaatz. On July 9, Twining traveled to White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, to view more wreckage. (Whether the wreckage Twining saw at Alamogordo and White Sands came from one or multiple crashes remains hazy.) Twining returned to Alamogordo on July 10 to observe new avionics and other classified work, and flew to Wright Field, Ohio, later that day.
Sample wreckage from one or multiple crashes went back to Wright with him.
Twining’s September 23, 1947, report to AAF Gen. George Schulgen plainly invokes “flying discs.” Twining described the crafts’ elliptical shapes as typically “flat on bottom and domed on top.” Although he acknowledged that many reports could be explained by weather, meteorites, and traditional aircraft, he asserted that the mysterious discs were legitimately unidentified, and of unknown origin. There was a “possibility,” he reported, that “some foreign nation has a form of propulsion [,] possibly nuclear, which is outside our domestic knowledge.” Lacking evidence, however, the possibility had to remain just that.
Twining did not speculate about the existence of secretly produced American saucers, because he knew they existed and did not care to reveal them, or because his best information told him that such saucers did not exist at all. (Of course, Twining may not have been made aware of American saucer activity.) The memo suggests, however, that the United States would be well served by development of such craft, regardless of the fact that such an endeavor would be “extremely expensive” and “time consuming.” In the memo’s subsection 2, Twining wrote, “It is the opinion that: a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious. b. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc, of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-made aircraft.” Twining mentioned the objects’ tendency to fly in formations of “three to nine objects” (a clear nod to the nine observed by Kenneth Arnold, and the United Airlines pilots Smith and Stevens). Twining had particular interest in the objects’ ability to climb steeply and quickly, and their propensity to display startling evasive action. Mindful of physical stresses on crews during such maneuvers, Twining felt that, possibly, “some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.” In subsection h., Twining said that, because of a “lack of physical evidence in shape of crash recovered exhibits,” the origins of the flying discs must remain undetermined. People disinclined to believe in UFOs cite this remark as proof that nothing had crashed three or four months earlier at Roswell or elsewhere.
That assumption, however, presumes that the memo’s recipient, General Schulgen, had sufficiently high security clearance to be let in on the full Roswell story. No specific evidence to suggest the granting of that clearance has surfaced. Certainly, Schulgen was not part of the later Majestic 12 investigation (see below), and thus lacked UFO-specific information available to Twining and other key members of that body.
Twining closed his memo by suggesting that a secret, code-named investigatory body be established to uncover the truth of UFOs. He emphasized the desirability of cooperation between military intelligence, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NEPA), the RAND group, the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project, and the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB). Because the Twining memo was forward-looking, it also was open-ended. It acknowledged the reality of UFOs and the mystery that surrounded them. Much more was still to be learned, and the military-intelligence establishment was obligated to pursue the truth.
Majestic 12
A significant addition to Roswell documentation arrived in 1984, when undeveloped photographs of documents related to a clandestine saucer- investigation project called Majestic 12 were mailed to Los Angeles-based television producer and UFO investigator Jaime Shandera. The package carried neither the sender’s name nor address, but the postmark read Albuquerque, New Mexico. Shandera developed the photos and found documents that appeared to be briefing material prepared in late 1952 or early 1953 for president-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower. The key document was dated September 24, 1947 (a day after the Twining Memo); it was sent from President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal. Via executive order, Truman instructed Forrestal to set up a secret UFO investigatory body, to get to the bottom of what had happened at Roswell earlier in the year, and to determine the credibility of other flying saucer reports. Further, the president wanted scientific information about flying saucers—particularly recovered weapons and propulsion systems that could be reverse-engineered.
This was bombshell stuff, not least because it established a link between flying saucers and Forrestal—who died in a fall, as an unconfirmed suicide, in 1949.
In 1986, two years after the mysterious delivery of the package, Shandera worked with author-researcher William L. Moore, who had published The Roswell Incident in 1980, to publicly release the documents. Not surprisingly, the papers engendered excitement and argument. At last, apparent proof that Washington not only acknowledged saucers, but secretly investigated them.
Majestic 12 continues to inspire heated—and contradictory—controversy.
Besides doubts cast on the veracity of the core documents (including the Twining memo discovered in the National Archives), MJ-12 is linked by some to the assassination of President Kennedy. According to this theory, the CIA (probably working through contractors) killed JFK because the president planned to disclose MJ-12’s existence, and expose CIA involvement in it and the Roswell cover-up. The Kennedy assassination aside, we know that the FBI cast a jaundiced eye on the documents and convinced itself that MJ-12 never existed.
The U.S. Air Force denied the past existence of any such body, and flatly declared the Shandera and National Archives documents to be fabrications.
Had MJ-12 been a true investigatory body, or just more disinformation created by Washington? Could the MJ-12 story have been a prank by saucer skeptics?
Perhaps the documents were the work of a UFOlogist who wished to discredit Shandera, or take down UFOlogists and others likely to vouch for the documents.
Then again, perhaps the Majestic 12 documents, all of them, are dead true.
The Twelve
The Shandera papers identify a dozen leading American scientists, military men, and politicians as comprising MJ-12, an embarrassment of riches that caused skeptics to cry “fake” Surely, they reasoned, an assemblage of people so critical to national security could not possibly be connected to the schoolboy fancy of flying-saucer studies. Skeptics were particularly dubious about the inclusion of Dr. Donald Howard Menzel (see chapter one), a onetime child prodigy, a Harvard professor of astrophysics, and an outspoken critic of UFO claims. His useful 1935 book Stars and Planets became an oft-reprinted field guide to the heavens, and his 1953 study Flying Saucers established him as a prominent debunker of UFO claims. The title of a 1963 book Menzel co-wrote with Lyle G. Boyd, The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age, suggested Menzel’s stance more than fifteen years after Roswell.
Menzel dedicated himself to clarity in thought and writing. In the year 2000, however, UFO researcher James R. Lewis—echoing UFOlogist Stanton Friedman—suggested that Menzel’s protestations may have been a blind; the professor had Top Secret, Ultra, security clearance and a long relationship with the National Security Agency. Further, he had had professional contact with the CIA. Not only did Menzel privately acknowledge the existence of UFOs, he reasoned that the craft had origins beyond our solar system.
Assuming that Menzel’s secret opinion was shared by other scientific and military heavyweights, the early Cold War period might have easily (and wisely) involved America’s top scientific and strategic thinkers in a formal evaluation of the UFO phenomenon. According to the political logic of 1947, God help an American president who ignored any aerial “phenomenon” that could be a threat.
Certainly, the beginning the U.S. government’s fascination with UFOs, the 1947 incident at Roswell, was well documented. Whether to investigate further, or simply to control the flow of information from Roswell and future events, the establishment of Majestic 12 or a similar high-security body makes sense. So, having addressed possible motives behind the creation of MJ-12, we can profitably consider the backgrounds of the operation’s principals. Alphabetical order is used here.
- Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, executive secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board. The board was established by the U.S. military in late September 1947. Its purpose was to work within and without the military establishment to formulate strategies based on military R&D, based, in part, on “recent and ongoing scientific developments” (emphasis added). Berkner’s special interest was the evaluation of weapons systems. Some people who have studied the so-called alien autopsy film footage insist that Berkner is one of the two surgeons visible on camera.
- Dr. Detlev Bronk, chairman of the National Research Council. He was a biophysicist and physiologist who served on Atomic Energy Commission’s medical advisory board. Claims have been made that Bronk is the other surgeon seen in the alien autopsy footage.
- Dr. Vannevar Bush, whose National Defense Research Council and Office of Scientific Research and Development were essential to the USA’s development of the atomic bomb.
- James V. Forrestal, American secretary of defense and the man who relayed President Truman’s saucer-investigation order. A college dropout, Forrestal had professional experience in finance and naval aviation before becoming President Roosevelt’s assistant, and later FDR’s undersecretary of the navy, and secretary of the navy for Roosevelt and Truman during World War II. In 1947, Truman chose Forrestal to fill the newly created defense-secretary cabinet post. Conflicts with the Administration about the establishment of an Arab Palestinian state (Forrestal favored it), Truman’s call for major cuts in defense spending (Forrestal opposed them), and the secretary’s premature meetings with 1948 presidential-race front-runner Thomas Dewey caused Truman to demand Forrestal’s resignation early in 1949. Forrestal handed over his letter on March 28, 1949. Eight weeks later he died in a fall from the sixteenth floor of the National Naval Medical Center, where he had been taken for treatment of depression. UFOlogists and others puzzled by Forrestal’s death have proposed that the former secretary was murdered by parties eager to cover up Washington’s awareness of UFOs. (Other theories point fingers at more obviously political forces.)
- Gordon Gray, assistant secretary of the army, and an assistant/adviser to President Truman on issues of national security. Gordon was named secretary of the army in 1949.
- Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, whom Truman named as Director of Central Intelligence, and overseer of the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) in September 1947. When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established in December 1947, Truman named Hillenkoetter as that agency’s first director. The admiral fell into trouble two years later, when the CIA issued a top-secret report asserting that the USSR would not have an A-bomb until mid-1950 at the earliest, and more probably not until the middle of 1953. The report was dated September 20, 1949—nearly a month after the Soviets’ successful, secret test of August 29.
- Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, chairman of the departments of mechanical and aeronautical engineering, MIT. Near the close of World War I, Hunsaker was a key figure in the development of U.S. air forces. He also did pioneering work with wind tunnels and airships.
- Dr. Donald Howard Menzel, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard, and an internationally regarded authority on the sun and the solar atmosphere. During World War II, he was a naval cryptologist. His public stance on UFOs was a skeptical one; his private opinion may have been the reverse.
- Gen. Robert M. Montague, onetime deputy commander of Fort Bliss, Texas, and later posted to Albuquerque to command the Atomic Energy Commission’s Sandia Missile Base. Because Montague’s work at Fort Bliss brought New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range under his purview, an assumption shared by many UFOlogists is that Montague was intimately aware of the 1947 incident at Roswell.
- Sidney W. Souers, a retired rear admiral who wrote the Intelligence section of the 1945 Eberstadt Report, a paper that recommended the creation of a National Security Council, and closer alignment between the U.S. intelligence community and people that shape foreign policy. During the first half of 1946, Souers directed Central Intelligence. At the time of his appointment to MJ-12, Souers was executive secretary to the National Security Council.
- Gen. Nathan E. Twining, posted to Wright-Patterson AFB, commander of Air Materiel Command. Because of his access to classified information, Twining shortly suggested the formation of an even more focused UFO study group. Such a group, called Project Sign (see chapter nine), was established during the first weeks of 1948.
- Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff who had been a key planner of the 1944 Allied invasion at Normandy. On October 1, 1947, virtually simultaneous with the establishment of MJ-12, General Vandenberg was appointed vice chief of staff of the newly established U.S. Air Force.