THE ULTIMATE SECRET – ROSWELL UNRAVELED
On the evening of July 2, 1947, several wit¬ nesses in and near Roswell, New Mexico, observed a disc-shaped object moving swiftly in a northwesterly direction through the sky. The following morning Mac Brazel, foreman of a ranch located near tiny Corona, New Mexico, rode out on horseback to move sheep from one field to another. Accompanying him was a young neighbor boy, Timothy D. Proctor. As they rode, they came upon strange debris—various-size chunks of metallic material -running from one hilltop, down an arroyo, up another hill, and running down the other side. To all appearances some kind of aircraft had exploded.
In fact Brazel had heard something that sounded like an explosion the night before, but because it happened during a rainstorm (though it was different from thunder), he had not looked into the cause. Brazel picked up some of the pieces. He had never seen anything like them. They were extremely light and very tough.
By the time events had run their course, the world would be led to believe that Brazel had found the remains of a weather balloon. For three decades, only those directly involved in the incident would know this was a lie. And in the early 1950s, when an enterprising reporter sought to reinvestigate the story, those who knew the truth were warned to tell him nothing.
The cover-up did not begin to unravel until the mid-1970s, when two individuals who had been in New Mexico in 1947 separately talked with investigator Stanton T. Friedman about what they had observed. One, an Albuquerque radio station employee, had witnessed the muzzling of a reporter and the shutting down of an in-progress teletyped news story about the incident. The other, an Army Air Force intelligence officer, had led the initial recovery operation.
The officer, retired Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, stated flatly that the material was of unearthly origin.
The uncovering of the truth about the Roswell incident—so called because it was from Roswell Field, the nearest Air Force base, that the recovery operation was directed—would be an excruciatingly difficult process. It continues to this day, even after publication of three books and massive documentation gleaned from inter¬ views with several hundred persons as well as other evidence. Besides being the most important case in UFO history—the one with the potential not to settle the issue of UFOs but to identify them as extraterrestrial spacecraft—the Roswell incident is also the most fully investigated. The principal investigators have been Friedman, William L. Moore (coauthor of the first of the books, The Roswell Incident [1980]), Kevin D. Randle, and Donald R. Schmitt.
Randle and Schmitt, associated with the Chicago-based Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), authored the most comprehensive account so far, UFO Crash at Roswell (1991). Friedman’s book, written with Don Berliner, will be published in 1992. From this research, the outlines of a complex, bizarre episode have emerged.
Eighth Air Force Commander Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, acting under orders from Gen.
Clements McMullen at the Pentagon, concocted the weather balloon story to “put out the fire,” in the words of retired Brig. Gen. Thomas DuBose, who in July 1947 was serving as adjutant to Ramey’s staff. The actual material, all who saw it agreed, could not possibly have come from a balloon. For one thing, there was far too much of it. For another, it was not remotely like balloon wreckage. Maj. Marcel described it:
[We found] all kinds of stuff—small beams about Vs or a half-inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. These looked something like balsa wood and were of about the same weight, although flexible, and would not burn. There was a great deal of an unusual parchmentlike substance which was brown in color and extremely strong, and a great number of small pieces of a metal like tin foil, except that it wasn’t tin foil. . . .
[The parchment writing] had little numbers and symbols that we had to call hieroglyphics because I could not understand them. . . . They were pink and purple. They looked like they were painted on. These little numbers could not be bro¬ ken, could not be burned . . . wouldn’t even smoke.
The metallic material not only looked but acted strange. It had memory. No matter how it was twisted or balled up, it would return to its original shape, with no wrinkles. One woman who saw a rolled-up piece tossed onto a table watched in astonishment as it unfolded itself until it was as flat, and as wrinkle-free, as the table top. When an acetylene torch was turned on samples of the material, they barely got warm and could be safely handled a moment or two later.
Air Force searchers scoured the recovery site until they had picked up what they thought were all pieces, however minuscule, of the crashed vehicle. Two years later, when Bill Brazel, Mac’s son, let it be known he had found a few pieces the soldiers had missed, an Air Force officer called on him and demanded them. He handed them over without argument. Young Brazel knew how serious the military was about all this. After all, in July 1947 the Air Force had held his father incommunicado for days and made certain (through threats and, it is suspected, a large bribe) that he never again talked about his discovery.
The material was secretly flown out of Eighth Army Headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, to Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson AFB) in Dayton, Ohio. At Wright Field, according to an officer who was there, Lt. Col. Arthur Exon (who would become commander of the base in the mid-1960s), it underwent analysis in the Air Force’s material evaluation laboratories. Some of it, he recalled, was “very thin but awfully strong and couldn’t be dented with heavy hammers. . . . It had [the scientists] pretty puzzled. . . . [T]he overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.”
U.S. GOVERNMENT IN CONTACT WITH E.T.’s?
Former CIA operative Victor Marchetti, coauthor of the best-selling The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974), thinks the U.S. government maintains secret contacts with extraterrestrials. He bases his suspicion—he admits he cannot prove it—on stories he heard while working at “high levels of the CIA.” These tales alleged that the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects electronic intelligence, had received “strange signals,” said by intelligence sources to be of extraterrestrial origin.
Marchetti could learn nothing about the content of these communications, which had a level of secrecy that was extraordinary even by the standards of the supersecret NSA. In the 1980s UFO investigators William Moore and Jaime Shandera heard comparable tales from Air Force intelligence sources. No good evidence backs up these tales, but they are undeniably intriguing, if only because of who is telling the tales.