Roswell

Military Forces Acting in Great Secrecy

Roswell - The Cover-up
Author unknown

One of the most contentious aspects of the many-faceted UFO enigma is the allegation that a number of flying saucers, together with their occupants, have crash-landed, and have been recovered by the military forces, acting in great secrecy. Such claims generally are dismissed for lack of proof, yet evidence in some cases is compelling. One series of incidents that seems indisputable - in the sense that several hundred witnesses have testified to it - is among the most thoroughly documented cases on record. Numerous TV documentaries and a film have now appeared as well as several books describing investigations into the so-called Roswell Incident (by William Moore and Charles Berlitz; Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner; Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt; and Karl Pflock). The following is a necessarily abbreviated account of a complex case which seems to have involved three separate crash sites in New Mexico. One was at Corona; the precise locations of the other two are still in dispute.

The Corona Debris:

During a violent thunderstorm in the first week of July 1947, an unusual aerial vehicle crashed on the J. B. Foster Ranch, south-east of Corona and about 75 miles north-west of Roswell, New Mexico. Early the next morning, ranch manager William `Mac' Brazel discovered a large amount of unusual debris scattered over a wide area. A few days later, Brazel drove into Roswell and alerted Sheriff George Wilcox, who in turn contacted Roswell Army Air Field, home of the elite 509th Bomb Group, the world's first atomic-bomb unit. Major Jesse Marcel, the bomb group's intelligence officer, together with Captain Sheridan Cavitt, a Counter Intelligence Corps officer, accompanied Mac Brazel to the site, where a quantity of wreckage was eventually recovered. Marcel testified that he found an area measuring about three-quarters of a mile long by 200 to 300 feet wide, strewn with a large amount of extremely lightweight, strong material.

"We found some . . . small bits of metal, but mostly we found some material that's hard to describe," Marcel told journalist Bob Pratt in 1979. "I'd never seen anything like that, and I still don't know what it was . . . I lit a cigarette lighter to some of this stuff, and it didn't burn. There were also small, solid members that you could not bend or break, but it didn't look like metal. It looked more like wood. They varied in size . . . perhaps three-eighths of an inch by one quarter of an inch thick . . . None of them were very long. The largest of these was about 3 feet long, but weightless. You couldn't even tell you had it in your hands - just like you handle balsa wood." Marcel also described having seen unusual two-colour `hieroglyphics' on some of the pieces, as well as parchment-like material which, again, did not burn.

In another interview in 1979, Marcel described how later he tried unsuccessfu1ly to bend or dent a piece of extremely light and thin metal which was about 2 feet long and a foot wide. "I tried to bend the stuff [but) it wouldn't bend," he said. "We even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledge hammer. And there was still no dent in it . . . It was possible to Bend this stuff back and forth, even to wrinkle it, but you could not put a crease in it that would stay . . . I would almost have to describe it as a metal with plastic properties." Marcel was convinced that the material had nothing to do with a weather balloon or radar target.

The area near Corona was sealed off by the military, and a wide search was initiated to recover the remaining debris. An official press statement was released at the Roswell base, authorized by Colonel William Blanchard, Commander of the 509th Bomb Group. "I had a call from Colonel Blanchard, and he told me to report to his office," said Walter Haut, base press officer at the time, during an interview with me. "He gave me the basic facts that he wanted put into the news release . . . that we had in our possession a flying saucer: A rancher had brought parts of it in to the Sheriff's office, and the material was flown to General Ramey, who was Commanding General of the Eighth Air Force."

Major Marcel was ordered to load the debris on a B-29 (one of several aircraft said to have been involved in transporting the materials from Roswell Army Air Field) and fly it to Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) at Dayton, Ohio, for examination. On arrival at an intermediate stop at Fort Worth Army Air Field (later Carswell Air Force Base), Texas (headquarters of the Eighth Air Force), General Roger Ramey took charge. He ordered Marcel and others on the plane not to talk to reporters. A second press statement then was issued which stated that the wreckage wvas nothing more than the remains of a weather balloon and its attached tinfoil radar target, which were prominently displayed at the press conference. Meanwhile, the real wreckage arrived at Wright Field under armed guard; Marcel returned to Roswell, and Brazel was held incommunicado by the military for nearly a week while the crash site was stripped of every scrap of debris.

A news leak via press wire from Albuquerque describing this fantastic story was interrupted and the radio station in question, and another, were warned not to continue the broadcast: `ATTENTION ALBUQUERQUE: CEASE TRANSMISSION. REPEAT. CEASE TRANSMISSION. NATIONAL SECURITY ITEM. DO NOT TRANSMIT. STAND BY . . .'

Project Mogul:

It has been suggested that at least some of the wreckage found near Corona could have come from a Top Secret project to develop a means of detecting and monitoring Soviet nuclear weapons - code-named Project Mogul - which conducted its operations from Alamogordo Army Air Field, New Mexico, in June and July 1947, using high-altitude balloon arrays and attached instrument packages. Flight 7, for instance, which lifted off on 2 July - when the unidentified aircraft is reported as having crashed near Corona - incorporated twenty meteorological balloons (to support the various devices attached). The array measured about 450 feet from top to bottom. All that was recovered at the landing-site - 31 miles east of Alamogordo in the Sacramento Mountains - was `one balloon neck'. On 3 July, another array of balloons (Flight 8) - made of then new polyethylene material - touched down about 20 miles west-north-west of the Alamogordo base and last was seen dragging north across the desert. Nothing ever was recovered. Although there is no proof that these balloons (and others in the Mogul series) came down in the Corona area, it is certainly possible that one of them - or at least some of the materials - did.

In his book Roswell in Perspective, Karl Pflock, a former CIA officer whose background in government induded a position as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Deputy Director) for Operational Test and Evaluation, states his belief that one or more of these balloon arrays was responsible for the debris found near Corona (a conclusion shared by the Air Force in its 1994 report, to be discussed later). More recent research suggests that Mogul Flight 4, launched on 4 June 1947, was the one most likely to have come down in the vicinity of Corona. (Pflock remains open- minded, however, to the probability that alien or unusual bodies were recovered elsewhere.) He correlates descriptions of the unknown debris with the known materials used in the Mogul arrays, induding the testimony of Dr Jesse Marcel Jr (Major Marcel's son) who handled some of the Corona wreckage collected by his father. In an affidavit, Jesse Jr reported that the debris included:

. . . a brittle, brownish-black plastic-like material, like Bakelite; and there were fragments of what appeared to be I-beams. On the inner surface of the I-beam, there appeared to be a type of writing [of] a purple-violet hue, and it had an embossed appearance. The figures were composed of curved, geometric shapes. It had noresemblance to Russian, Japanese or any other foreign language. It resembled hieroglyphics, but it had no animal-like characters

As Pflock points out, materials used in the construction of Project Mogul's instrument packages included aluminium foil laminated on to a tough white or brown paper or tough aluminium-coated paper, struts of hardened balsawood, Bakelite, and clear or whitish sticky tape, about 2 inches wide, with `pink and purple flower-like figures on it'. Mac Brazel's daughter, Bessie, who helped her father collect some of the debris on their ranch, recalls that:

The debris looked like pieces of a large balloon which had burst . . . Most of it was a kind of double-sided material, foil-like on one side and rubbery-like on the other . . . the foil more silvery than the rubber. Sticks, like kite sticks, were attached to some of the pieces with a whitish tape . . . about two or three inches wide and had flower-like designs on it . . .

It is evident from the foregoing that at least some of the wreckage recovered on Mac Brazel's ranch may have been of man-made origin, though it is impossible to reconcile this explanation with all the facts. Major Marcel, it should be noted, was familiar with balloon debris and was convinced that the material he handled was unfamiliar, in that it was impossible to dent or burn, and that, no matter what was done to it, the foil-like metal always returned to its original shape. Such materials hardly relate to Mogul.

Currently the State Surgeon of Montana and a colonel with the Montana Air National Guard (flying helicopters), Jesse Jr disputes the contention that the debris he handled was from a Mogul balloon or instrument package. `The Mogul device apparently was a lot of metal foil with white paper backing to strengthen it,' he said in 1995. `The material I saw was metal foil, but did not have the white paper backing.' Lieutenant McAndrew - the Air Force's principal researcher for the 1994 report, who interviewed Dr Marcel after the Air Force had prepared its report, also said that the debris included tape with flowery figures written across it. `Well, I didn't see any tape,' said Dr Marcel. `And there was supposed to be some balsa wood struts with the Mogul device, but I didn't see any balsa wood. I saw metal struts, not balsa wood struts, and the writing I saw was on the metal strut itself, not on tape.'

Containment Strategy:

Numerous military and civilian personnel have testified that an elaborate deception operation followed the recovery of the Corona wreckage. It is hard to believe that this was initiated solely to avoid compromising the classified Mogul project.

Thomas Jefferson DuBose was Chief of Staff to Major General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth Army Air Field during the Roswell incident. A colonel at the time, he retired from the Air Force in 1959 with the rank of brigadier general. In an interview with Billy Cox (whom I know to be reliable), DuBose confirmed that a `containment strategy' was ordered by Major General Clements McMullen, Deputy Commander, Strategic Air Command. `Knowing General McMullen,' said DuBose, `[the cover-up] was an effort to get it off the front pages, to keep people from thinking about it. I couldn't blame him for that.'

On the evening of 6 July 1947, after a stop over in Fort Worth and by order of McMullen, the debris was flown to Washington, according to DuBose. `[Some of] this stuff, this junk, this whatever you want to call it, came in a mail pouch,' he recalled:

I didn't look at it, I wasn't supposed to. McMullen told me to send it to him immediately, and for me not to say anything about it to anyone, to forget about it, and that was an order. I sealed it personally with a lead seal and handcuffed it to the wrist of [Colonel) A1 Clark, which is a rather unusual step, and he delivered it to McMullen. Later, after the whole thing was over, I asked Clements what happened to it, and he said he sent it out to Wright Field so they could analyze it . . . Following the press release issued by Walter Haut, the Roswell Army Air Field was deluged with calls. `It was getting ridiculous,' said DuBose:

There was a host of people descending on our headquarters [at Forth Worth] seeking information from Ramey, badgering him for information we didn't have. I didn't know what it was. Blanchard didn't know. Ramey didn't know - we were in a real bind. McMullen said, Iook, why don't you come up with something, anything you can use to get the press off our back? So we came up with this weather balloon story. Somebody got one and we ran it up a couple of hundred feet and dropped it to make it look like it crashed, and that's what we used. Now I imagine privately, some people felt bad about doing things that way. But it worked. The story stuck.

There were also other reasons for the containment strategy. `You have to understand what was happening in this country at the time, things that had never happened before in the history of man,' DuBose explained to Billy Cox. `We had just gone through a world war. We had seen the firebombing of great cities, atomic bombs, destruction on an unprecedented scale. Then came this flying saucer business. It was just too much for the public to have to deal with.

Top-Secret Studies:

Brigadier General Arthur Exon (retired) is a former pilot with over 300 hours of combat during the Second World War. After the war he was assigned to Air Materiel Command HQ at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base), and became commander of the base in 1964. In interviews with Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt, authors of two books on the Roswell incident, Exon confirmed that the peculiar fragments from New Mexico were secretly flown to Wright Field, and that laboratory chiefs established a special projects unit to study them. As a lieutenant colonel at the time, Exon says that he handled some of the wreckage. Various scientific tests were carried out, including `chemical analysis, stress tests, compression tests, flexing', he told Randle and Schmitt:

It was brought into our material evaluation labs . . . [Some of it) could be easily ripped or changed . . . there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with heavy hammers . . . It was flexible to a degree . . . some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and other[s] almost like foil but strong . . . The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.

Exon surmised that some remnants were still stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, most probably at the Foreign Technology Division (now the National Air'Intelligence Center). Interestingly, I have learned from a confidential source that even some recovered fabric was subjected to a process of analysis known as `reverse engineering', in an endeavour to discover the composition of unknown materials contained therein.

An unauthenticated `Top Secret/Eyes Only' memorandum (see p. 467) leaked to the researcher Timothy Cooper may shed further light on the initial studies of the recovered materials. Purportedly written by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Director of Central Intelligence, and sent to the Joint Intelligence Committee, the memo states:

Currently, the core material is being secured at the Naval Research Laboratory hangar facilities at the White Sands Proving Ground, the Sandia Base facilities (Armed Forces Special Weapons Project), Alamogordo AAF and the Aero Medical Research facilities at Randolph Field, Texas . . . The research scientists at the Air Forces Research and Development Center, Wright Field, are utilizing their test facilities and a new biological laboratory in an on-going study program . . .

Majestic-12:

In December 1984 Hollywood TV producer Jaime Shandera received in the post a package from an anonymous source containing an undeveloped roll of 35mm film. When developed, the frames showed eight pages of an alleged preliminary briefing-paper prepared on 18 November 1952 for President-elect Eisenhower by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the former CIA Director, and a 24 September 1947 memo from President Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, supposedly authorizing `Operation Majestic Twelve'. The briefing-paper, classified `'TOP SECRET/ MAGIC/EYES ONLY', summarized what the alleged Majestic-12 committee had learned about the UFO problem up to 1952, including details about the Roswell recovery.

In early 1987 I received a copy of the documents from an intelligence source in the United States, and these were published for the first time in my book Above Top Secret later that year. Some valid objections to the authenticity of the documents have been made over the years,'3 not least that the signature of Truman almost certainly was `lifted' from a known-to- be-authentic document. And surely General Eisenhower, as Army Chief of Staff in 1947, would already have been given some details of the Roswell incident, at least. These and other apparent inconsistencies are discussed in exhaustive studies by Stanton Friedman and by William Moore and Jaime Shandera, who suggest that, even if the documents are bogus (which I believe to be the case), some of the details contained therein are factual: it is evident that whoever produced the documents had inside knowledge. For this reason, I regard the MJ-12 briefing-paper as `positive disinformation'. I have been criticized for publishing an `obviously fraudulent' document. Still, it has to be said that at least one intelligence expert shared my original belief that the MJ-12 papers seemed authentic. In a letter to aerospace engineer Lee Graham, Richard M. Bissell Jr, a former CIA Deputy Director of Plans who had been on President Truman's White House staff, wrote that, although he had no knowledge of Majestic-12, the Eisenhower briefing-document `certainly looks authentic', and added: `On the basis of the material you have sent me I personally have little doubt that it is authentic." Later he changed his opinion, explaining in a letter to sceptic Philip Klass that initially he had been `unaware that the authenticity of the material had been seriously questioned'.7

Yet even if both documents are bogus, several scientific and intelligence personnel have confirmed that a committee known as Majestic-12 (Majic-12 or MJ-12) did indeed exist, and that it dealt with the recovery of extraterrestrial craft. British-born Dr Eric A. Walker, for example, who died in 1995, was a Harvard graduate whose former posts included Executive Secretary of the Research and Development Board, Chairman of the National Science Foundation's Committee for Engineering, Chairman of the Institute for Defense Analysis, and President of Pennsylvania State Universitv. In a recorded telephone conversation with researcher William Steinman, Dr Walker confirmed that he had attended meetings at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (around 1949-50) concerning the military recovery of flying saucers and bodies of occupants.

`Did you ever hear of the MJ-12 group?' asked Steinman. `Yes, I know of MJ-12. I have known of them for forty years,' replied Dr Walker. `You are delving into an area that you can do absolutely nothing about,' he added. `Why don't you just leave it alone and drop it?'

French researcher Jean Sider reports that he too has obtained confirmation for the existence of MJ-12. `One comes first-hand from a retired American scientist, the other second-hand from a friend, himself an official, who received the information from a high-ranking military officer still on active duty."

The briefing-document names the alleged twelve original members of the MJ-12 panel, as follows:

Dr Lloyd Berketer: a scientist who was Executive Secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board in 1946 (under Dr Vannevar Bush). He headed a special committee to direct a study that led to the establishment of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, and was also a member of the CIA's `Robertson Panel', a scientific advisory panel on UFOs requested by the White House and sponsored by the CIA in 1953 (see Chapter 16).

Dr Detlev Bronk: an internationally known physiologist and biophysicist who was Chairman of the National Research Council and a member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission. With Dr Edward Condon, Director of the National Bureau of Standards (who later headed the Air Force-sponsored UFO project at the University of Colorado), Bronk became a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Dr Vannevar Bush: recognized as one of America's leading scientists, he organized the National Defense Research Council in 1941 and the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1943, which led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. After the war Dr Bush became head of the Joint Research and Development Board. As the Canadian Government scientist Wilbert Smith noted in a Top Secret memorandum (Chapter 10), Dr Bush headed a `small group' set up to investigate UFOs, which matter `is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb'. Could this `small group' have been `Majestic 12'? If so, Bush's background in co-ordinating top-secret intelligence research projects - and his concern with the compartmental- ization of classified information - would have made him the ideal choice to head the group. In 1949, for instance, the US Intelligence Board, the co-ordinating body of all US Government intelligence agencies, commis- sioned Bush to recommend methods of linking all the intelligence bureaucracies, a move initiated by James Forrestal - coincidentally another alleged member of MJ-12.

James Forrestal: served as Secretary of the Navy before becoming Secretary of Defense in July 1947 (the time of the Roswell incident) - a position held until a mental breakdown led to his resignation in March 1949. He committed suicide at Bethesda Naval Hospital in May 1949. The MJ-12 briefing paper names General Walter Bedell Smith (see below) as his successor.

Gordon Gray: Assistant Secretary of the Army at the time MJ-12 was supposedly established, he became Secretary of the Army in 1949. In 1949 he was also appointed as SPecial Assistant to President Truman on National Security Affairs, and in 1951 directed the CIA's Psychological Strategy Board. (The latter is referred to in a 1952 directive to the National Security Council from CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith - see p. 401.) He was also adviser on national security matters to President Eisenhower in the last two years of his term of office, and was a chairman of the highly secret `54/12 Group' or `Special Group' formed in the early years of the Eisenhower administration.

Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter: the third Director of Central Intelligence, from 1947 to 1950, and the first Director of the CIA, which was established in the same month as the supposed MJ-12 group - September 1947. Hillenkoetter was one of the first intelligence chiefs to make public his conviction that UFOs are real, and that `through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense' (Chapter 16). Hillenkoetter was also on the board of directors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and was therefore in an excellent position to monitor the activities of this influential civilian group.

Dr Jerome Hunsaker: a brilliant aircraft designer who headed the Departments of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was Chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. His opinion on the materials recovered at Roswell would have been invaluable.

Dr Donald Menzel: Director of the Harvard College Observatorv, he is chiefly remembered for his dismissive statements and books on UFOs, all of which, he insisted, could be explained in mundane terms. The name of Menzel on the MJ-12 list came as a complete surprise, until Stanton Friedman learned that he had been a top-class expert in code-breaking (holding a Top Secret Ultra security clearance), had a lengthy association with the National Security Agency and its predecessor Navy group, and furthermore had been a consultant to several US Presidents on national security affairs!"  General Robert Montague: base commander at the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Sandia Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico, from July 1947 to February 1951.

Rear Admiral Sidney Souers: the first Director of Central Intelligence (January June 1946), who in September 1947 (when MJ-12 was allegedly set up) became Executive Secretary of the National Security Council. Following his resignation in 1959 Souers was retained as a special consultant to the Executive on security matters.

General Nathan Twining: an outstanding commander of bombing operations in both the European and Pacific theatres during the Second World War. In 1945 he was appointed Commanding-General of Air Materiel Command, based at Wright Field (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). A declassified document reveals that in September 1947 Twining presented the conclusions of AMC that `the phenomenon reported is something real' (see Chapter 14). Significantly, Twining suddenly cancelled a planned trip to the West Coast on 8 July 1947, the day of the first press release announcing the recovery of a crashed disc near Roswell, `due to a very important and sudden matter'. Researcher William Moore has learned that while reporters were told that Twining was out of the office, `probably in Washington DC', he had in fact made a sudden trip to New Mexico, where he remained until 10 July.

The remaining member of the alleged MJ-12 panel was General Hoyt Vandenberg. Following a distinguished career in the Army Air Forces, he became the second Director of Central Intelligence in 1946, a position he held until May 1947. In August 1948, when a Top Secret `Estimate of the Situation' by the Air Technical Intelligence Center offered its opinion that UFOs were interplanetary, Vandenberg - Air Force Chief of Staff at the time - ordered the document to be burned (Chapter 14).

The Bodies:

The most controversial and confusing aspect of the Roswell case centres around the claim by a number of military and civilian witnesses that not only were there three crash sites, but that alien bodies were discovered at two of them, and controversy surrounds the precise location of these sites. In the unauthenticated Top Secret memorandum cited earlier (not to be confused with the MJ-12 briefing-paper), Rear Admiral Hillenkoetter allegedly stated that:

The recovery of unidentified planform aircraft in the state of New Mexico on 6 July 1947, ten miles northwest of Oscura Peak, and a debris field 75 miles northwest of the Army's 509th Atomic Bomb Group, Roswell Army Air Field, is confirmed. A subsequent capture of another similar craft 30 miles east of the Army's Alamogordo Army Air Field on 5 July 1947, has convinced the Army Air Forces S-2, Army G-2 and Navy ONI, that the craft and wreckage are not of US manufacture.

No reference is made in this document to the recovery of alien bodies, possibly because - assuming the document to be genuine - such information would have been restricted to those with an appropriate Top Secret-based compartmented access.

Major Jesse Marcel was quite certain that no bodies were among the debris he collected near Corona, and that whatever the object was it must have exploded above ground. In a recorded interview with Randle and Schmitt, Brigadier General Arthur Exon testified that in November 1947 he personally flew over two crash sites. At the second site - reported by Schmitt and Randle to be about 35 miles north-north-west of Roswell Army Air Field, based on dubious testimony (and not corroborated by Exon) - the main body of the craft apparently had come to rest. `They did say there were bodies,' said Exon. `They were all found, apparently, outside the craft itself but were in fairly good condition. In other words, they weren't broken up a lot.'

Interestingly, although professing no knowledge of a `Majestic-12' group, Exon stated that, following the incident, a highly secret committee - which he referred to as the `Unholy Thirteen' - was set up under President Truman and controlled all access to the wreckage, bodies and all information thereon and, later, to all classified UFO reports. The committee members, he is quoted as having told Randle and Schmitt, included General Carl Spaatz, first US Air Force Chief of Staff; James Forrestal, then Secretary of War; and probably the Director of the CIA, Rear Admiral Hillenkoetter. (General Exon has subsequently pointed out that he only suggested these names as possibilities.)

Stanton Friedman, who has devoted many years to studying the Majestic-12 affair, is convinced that the briefing-document contains significant information - not least, regarding the Roswell incident. According to the document, during the recovery of the debris 75 miles north-west of Roswell:

. . . aerial reconnaissance discovered that four small human-like beings had apparently ejected from the craft at some point before it exploded. These had fallen to earth about two miles east of the wreckage site. All four were dead and badly decomposed due to action by predators and exposure to the elements during the approximately one week time period which had elapsed before their discovery. A special scientific team took charge of removing these bodies for study . . .

The briefing-paper goes on:

A covert effort organized by Gen. Twining and Dr. Bush acting on the direct orders of the President, resulted in a preliminary consensus. . . that the disc was most likely a short range reconnaissance craft.

This conclusion was based for the most part on the craft's size and the apparent lack of any identifiable provisioning . . . A similar analysis of the four dead occupants was ananged by Dr. Bronk. It was the tentative conclusion of this group . . . that although these creatures are human-like in appearance, the biological and evolutionary processes responsible for their development has [sic] apparently been quite different from those observed or postulated in homo-sapiens. Dr. Bronk's team has suggested the term `Extra-tenestrial Biological Entities', or `EBEs', be adopted as the standard term of reference for these creatures until such time as a more definitive designation can be agreed upon.

Although not mentioned in the spurious MJ-12 briefing-paper, there was reportedly another crash site in an area west of Socono, New Mexico, in the Plains of San Agustin, where witnesses allegedly discovered not only a damaged metallic disc resting on the flat desert ground, but also dead bodies - and possibly a survivor. The location of this site remains in dispute. If the unauthenticated memorandum from Hillenkoetter of 19 September 1947, for example, is anything to go by, the second recovery of an `unidentified planform aircraft' (in addition to thewreckage site 75 miles north-west of Roswell) occurred 10 miles north-west of Oscura Peak, 35 miles south-east of Socono. This would place it within the White Sands Proving Ground, but nowhere near the Plains of San Agustin. According to Hillenkoetter's report, the first recovery took place 30 miles east of Alamogordo Army Air Field, over 100 miles south-east of Socorro - again, nowhere near the Plains.

An early witness on the scene was Grady L. `Barney' Barnett, a civil engineer with the US Soil Conservation Service who was on a military assignment at the time, working from Magdalena. He told his friends LaVerne and Jean Maltais that in the late 1940s (the July 1947 date later established by Stanton Friedman) he had encountered a metallic, disc-shaped `aircraft' in the desert. While he was examining it, a small group of people arrived who said they were part of an archaeological research team from the University of Pennsylvania.

According to the Maltaises, Barnett recalled that the bodies apparently had fallen out of the craft, which had split open on impact. The disc seemed to be made of a metal that looked like dirty stainless steel. When Barnett approached for a closer look, he noticed dead bodies inside and outside the vehicle - the ones outside thrown out by the impact. They were like humans but they were not humans, he reported. The heads were round and larger in proportion to their bodies, hairless, and the eyes small and oddly spaced. Their clothing seemed to be one-piece and grey in colour, without zippers, belts or buttons. Military personnel approached and cordoned off the area. `We were told to leave the area and not to talk to anyone whatever about what we had seen . . . that it was our patriotic duty to remain silent,' Barnett told the Maltaises. In his affidavit, included in a briefing for the Congressional Staff prepared by Fred Whiting and the Fund for UFO Research, LaVerne Maltais stated as follows:

. . . Around 1950, Mr. Barnett told me that several years before, during a field trip in New Mexico, he discovered a crashed disc-shaped craft with the bodies of strange beings on the ground. He was absolutely convinced that the craft was from outer space.

The beings he described were similar - but not identical - to humans. They were 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall; slim and hairless, with large pear-shaped heads. They had four fingers on each hand. T'hey were dressed in tight-fitting, metallic suits. All of them were dead.

Mr. Barnett said that at the time of his discovery, he was joined by four or five people on an archeology dig. Shortly afterward, military personnel arrived and escorted them from the area. They told him to keep quiet about the incident, that it was in the national interest for them to get out of there. Mr. Barnett was a man of great personal integrity who would never tell a lie.

At least three other local people told Stanton Friedman about their recollections of a flying saucer having crashed `out in the Plains' at the time: one confirmed that it had been brought out at night by the military, through Magdalena.z And in the 1960s William D. Leed III, then a Colonel with the US Army Reserve Signal Corps, who had a strong interest in UFOs, went to visit Barnett, at the suggestion of a fellow officer. In his affidavit, included in the Fund for UFO Research's Congressional briefing, Leed stated:

. . . In early September of 1964 or 1965, I visited Mr. Barnett at his home in Roswell, N.M., and identified myself as a member of the military whose interest was purely personal and not official. I talked with him for about 15 minutes. He told me of coming upon a `flying saucer' in the desert more than 10 years before and inspecting it. He said he touched it and found it not to be hot. It had a very smooth surface. He said it was about 12 feet across and saucer-shaped. He walked around it but was unable to enter it. He said that, two-to-three days later, the area was swarming with people from the U.S. Army Air Forces who removed the `saucer'.

Mr. Barnett told me he was subsequently interviewed for many hours on at least three occasions by men from several different levels of government, was told to `shut up', and was threatened, and felt threatened by them . . .

Another, more controversial witness to the alleged Plains of San Agustin incident is Gerald Anderson, who claims to have been present at the crash site (near Horse Springs) when he was six years old, together with his father, brother, uncle and cousin. He confirms that five college students and their professor (Dr Buskirk) subsequently arrived on the scene, and insists that one of the three alien creatures survived the crash. Anderson has provided a great deal of intriguing information, published in Stanton Friedman's and Don Berliner's book Crash at Corona. Although Schmitt and Randle reject the Anderson story outright, Friedman and Berliner present some evidence for its authenticity.

The Plains of San Agustin are about 150 miles west of the Corona site. Was the disc allegedly recovered near Horse Springs another craft that had also come to grief independently, or had it collided with the disc supposedly recovered closer to Roswell? Randle and Schmitt have satisfied themselves that the archaeological research team was present at a site 35 miles north-north-west of Roswell (their preferred location for the recovery of bodies) - not the Plains of San Agustino - but Friedman and Berliner dispute this. And it has to be said that the testimony of Frank Kaufmann, who provided the location of this site, is extremely dubious, as Karl Pflock shows convincingly.

Among those assigned to guarding one of the crash sites and, later, removing the bodies to the Roswell base was Sergeant Melvin Brown, who years later told his family about the incident. `They had to form a ring around whatever it was they had to cover, and everything was put on trucks, said Beverly Bean one of Brown's daughters, when I interviewed the family:

They were told not to look and to take no notice, and were sworn to secrecy. I can remember my dad saying he couldn't understand why they wanted refrigerated trucks. And him and another guy had to sit on the back of the truck to take this stuff to a hangar. They were packed in ice. And he lifted up the tarpaulin and looked in, and he saw three (or possibly two) dead bodies.

He told us they were nothing to be scared of. They were friendly-looking and had nice faces. They looked Asian, he said, but had larger heads and no hair. They looked a yellowy colour. He was frightened a bit, because he knew he shouldn't be doing it, so he only had a quick glimpse.

According to other witnesses, the initial autopsies were carried out at Roswell Army Air Field. Glenn Dennis, a mortician with the Ballard Funeral Home, who did contract work at the base (induding ambulance work), is one of many who have signed affidavits for a Congressional inquiry, testifying to the recovery of alien wreckage and bodies. For me, his testimony is reliable and convincing.

One afternoon in July 1947 Dennis was asked by the base mortuary officer about the availability of small, hermetically sealed coffins, in case they might be needed `in future'. Less than an hour later the officer called again, asking Dennis to describe the chemical preparation for bodies that had been lying in the desert for 'a period of time and what effect such procedures would have on the bodies' chemical compounds, blood and tissues.

Dennis explained that the chemicals he used were mainly strong solutions of formaldehyde and water, and that the procedure would probably alter the bodily chemical composition. `I offered to come out to the base to assist with any problem he might have,' Dennis stated, `but he reiterated that the information was for future use.'

Just over an hour later Dennis received a request to transport a serviceman who had been injured in an unrelated incident. He drove an ambulance to the back of the base infirmary and parked alongside another ambulance. `The door was open and inside I saw some wreckage,' he reports in his affidavit. `There were several pieces . . . about three feet in length [which] resembled stainless steel with a purple hue, as if it had been exposed to high temperature. There was some strange-looking writing on the material resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics. Also two MPs [military policemen] were present.'

After checking in the serviceman, Dennis proceeded to the staff lounge, intending to look for a nurse - a second lieutenant - with whom he was romantically involved.

I saw her coming out of one of the examining rooms with a cloth over her mouth. She said, `My gosh, get out of here or you're going to be in a lot of trouble.' She went into another door where a captain stood. He asked me who I was and what I was doing here. I told him, and he instructed me to stay there. I said, `It looks like you've got a crash; would you like me to get ready?' He told me to stay right there. The two MPs came and began to escort me out of the infirmary. They said they had orders to follow me out to the funeral home.

Another captain then advised Dennis that he had seen nothing, that there had been no crash, and that if he said anything he could get into a lot of trouble. `Hey look, mister,' said Dennis, `I'm a civilian and you can't do a damn thing to me.' `Yes we can,' replied the captain, `somebody will be picking your bones out of the sand.'

The following day, Dennis tried to contact the nurse, who later called back and agreed to meet him. 'Before I talk to you' she insisted, 'you have to give me your sacred oath that you will never mention my name.' Dennis gave his word, and she told him an extraordinary story.

The nurse said she had been asked by two doctors to take notes while they performed a preliminary autopsy on three small bodies, 3 1/2 to 4 feet in height. There was a terrible smell, and it was the most gruesome sight she had ever seen. Two of the bodies were mangled and dismembered, but one was fairly intact. Their heads were disproportionately large for their bodies, and the skulls were flexible. Their eyes were deeply set, their noses concave with two small orifices, and the mouths consisted of a fine slit, with what the doctors described as heavy cartilage instead of teeth. The ears were merely small orifices with flaps. They had no hair, and the skin was very darkened - perhaps from exposure to the sun. The arms were long and slender, with four fingers on the hand which appeared to have small suction cups at each tip. The nurse said that she and the doctors became ill, and the air conditioning had to be turned off in case the smell permeated the hospital. Eventually the autopsy had to be moved to an aircraft hangar.

Glenn Dennis reports that the nurse (recently named as Naomi Maria Selff) was transferred to England, and later he learned that apparently she had been killed in a plane crash during a training mission. No evidence for such a crash has been forthcoming.

Oliver Wendell Henderson, stationed at Roswell Arxny Air Field during the time of the New Mexico crash/retrievals, is yet another witness who has provided testimony. `Pappy' Henderson, who held a Top Secret clearance, ran the `Green Hornet Airline , which involved flying C-54 and C-47 military transport aircraft, carrying VIPs, scientists and materials from Roswell to the Pacific, during the atom-bomb tests. After seeing an article about the Roswell incident in a newspaper in 1980 or 1981, Henderson told his wife to read the article. `It's a true story,' he said. `I'm the pilot who flew the wreckage of the UFO to Dayton, Ohio. I guess now that they're putting it in the papers, I can tell you about this.'

According to an affidavit by Sappho Henderson, her husband described the beings as small, with large heads for their size. `He said the material that their suits were made of was different from anything he had ever seen. He said they looked strange. I believe he mentioned that the bodies had been packed in dry ice to preserve them.'

Congressional Inquiry:

In March 1993, armed with numerous affidavits, US Congressman Steven Schiff (First Congressional District, New Mexico) decided to initiate official inquiries into the Roswell incident. Schiff, who has a background in law and serves as a lieutenant colonel in the New Mexico Air National Guard, began with a letter to Defense Secretary Les Aspin, requesting a written report and a full briefing by Pentagon officials on the nature of the debris recovered outside Roswell in July 1947 and an explanation for the Government's actions. There was no response.

A second request resulted in a reply from the Defense Department's congressional liaison office, referring the Congressman to the National Archives, on the grounds that all Air Force records from Project Blue Book were stored there. But no files on Roswell could be found in Blue Book records.

`I thought this would be a routine request handled in a routine way,' said Congressman Schiff during an interview in his office with Lawrence Moore and me for a British documentary in 1994. `I felt that the response I got was not routine - to just be referred to another agency without even an offer of assistance . . . That simple bit of courtesy is something frankly I would have expected from a Government agency. And I don't recall any such similar response where basically the request was just blown off'

In October 1993 Schiff decided to take up the matter with the Controller General, Charles Bowsher, head of the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. Within a few days Schiff's office received a call from the GAO investigator (a specialist in military and intelligence matters) who had been assigned to the case.

The GAO investigation ran into difficulties at its outset. Colonel Larry Shockley, Director for Plans and Operations in the Secretary of Defense's Congressional liaison office, reportedly told the GAO investigator who indicated an interest in the Roswell case that `You've got no business getting into that.'

`My own inclination is not toward an extraterrestrial explanation,' Schiff told us in 1994:

There remains every possibility that this was a weather balloon accompanied by a public-relations fiasco. If it's not a weather balloon, I would look for something maybe being tested at White Sands Missile Range, which is nearby, for an explanation. But clearly a lot of questions have been raised - questions which suggest that, even if one does not believe in extraterrestrial visitation, this wasn't a weather balloon. From the statements of witnesses that I've seen and read, a number of individuals described that whatever it was that was recovered . . . the materials were under armed guard. And I think it's logical to say that weather balloons aren't normally flown in special planes under armed guard.

To Congressman Schiff the overall issue is not exactly what the device was, but the US Government's accounting for what it was. `I think everybody has a right to go to their Government and to see documents, unless there is a dear and immediate and present security reason why they may not be permitted to do so,' he says.

The Air Force Report:

In September 1994 - perhaps to pre-empt the GAO's findings, which were made available to Congressman Schiffs office in July 1995 - the Air Force issued a twenty-three-page Report of Air Force Research Regarding the `Roswell Incident'. The report concluded that a Project Mogul balloon array and instrument package were most probably responsible for the tales of a crashed flying saucer:

The Air Force research did not locate or develop any information that the `Roswell Incident' was a UFO event. All available official materials, although they do not directly address Roswell per se, indicate that the most likely source of the wreckage recovered from the Brazel Ranch was from one of the Project Mogul balloon trains . . . Additionally, it seems that there was over-reaction by Colonel Blanchard and Major Marcel, in originally reporting that a `flying disc' had been recovered when, at that time, nobody for sure knew what the term even meant since it had only been in use for a couple of weeks.

Likewise, there was no indication in official records from the period that there was heightened military operational or security activity which should have been generated if this was, in fact, the first recovery of material and/or persons from another world. The post-War US Military (or today's for that matter) did not have the capability to rapidly identify, recover, coordinate, cover-up, and quickly minimize public scrutiny of such an event. The claim that they did so without leaving even a little bit of a suspicious paper trail for 47 years is incredible . . .

Aside from the fact that key military records from the period have been destroyed illegally (see later) - thus sabotaging the chances of uncovering a paper trail - it is curious that the Air Force investigation failed to interview most of the dozens of still-surviving military and civilian witnesses (e.g. Brigadier General Arthur Exon or Glenn Dennis). Perhaps anticipating criticism for this neglect, the Air Force report commented:

Lastly, persons who have come forward and provided their names and made claims, may have, in good faith but in the `fog of time', misinterpreted past events. The review of Air Force records did not locate even one piece of evidence to indicate that the Air Force has had any part in an `alien' body recovery operation or continuing cover-up . . .

Most interestingly, as this report was being written, [Karl] Pflock published his own report [and] concluded from his research that the Brazel Ranch debris originally reported as a `flying disc' was probably debris from a Mogul balloon; however, there was a simultaneous incident that occurred not far away, that caused an alien craft to crash and that the [Army Air Forces] subsequently recovered three alien bodies therefrom. Air Force research did not locate any information to corroborate that this incredible incident occurred, however . . .

It is recommended that this document serve as the final Air Force report related to the Roswell matter, for the GAO, or any other inquiries.

Although the Air Force report was released by the USAF's Public Affairs Media Relations Division, its author was Colonel Richard Weaver, Director, Security and Special Program Oversight, of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations - an agency whose work involves counter- intelligence operations and deception, and which has a long record of deep involvement in the UFO problem.

Colonel Weaver's mid-1994 report draws unusual and prominent attention to its author's high-level organization within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, i.e. the department's secretariat. Weaver's office reports to the Secretary through but one intermediary, the Secretary of the Air Force Administrative Assistant (SAF/AA). Colonel Weaver was the SAF/AA deputy for security and investigative programs (SAF/AAZ), and the report itself says this. SAF/AAZ is, therefore, a very high-level organization within the entire Department of the Air Force that includes the Air Force as a military service. SAF/AAZ also is peculiar in that the secretariats of the other two military departments (Army and Navy) do not have organizations similar or equivalent to SAF/AAZ.

Located in Room 5D972 of the Pentagon, one floor above the office of the Secretary, SAF/AAZ's office is next door to the office of the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), which reports directly to the Secretary and to the Chief of Staff US Air Force. The SAB first held a meeting to discuss the UFO problem in 1948 (see Chapter 14). Variously, during the period 1946 to 1964, five persons with other connections to the UFO question served on the SAB: Dr Detlev Bronk; Lieutenant General James Doolittle; Dr H. P. Robertson; Dr George E. Valley Jr, and Dr Theodore von Karman.

The personnel complement of SAF/AAZ is interesting. In addition to Colonel Weaver (replaced later in 1994 by Lieutenant Colonel Eric Patterson), members include an executive assistant; an assistant for special programmes and oversight (likely the Special Access Programs, or `SAPs', mentioned in the report); two security officers (one civilian employee and one NCO); two administrative assistants (an NCO and an airman); and two special planners (both USAF officers). In Air Force parlance, the term `special plans' is a euphemism for deception as well as for `perception management' plans and operations (not to be confused with psychological operations (PSYOP).

Special planners plan and monitor for effectiveness Air Force deception operations that ordinarily support combat and other wartime operations. Typically, special plans provide diversionary, misleading and false manoeuvres, equipment and information, with the aim of distracting and confusing enemy commanders and their intelligence staffs during warfare operations. Perception management is an extension of deception on a broader or strategic scale, perhaps not always limited to warfare.

According to the position descriptions of the special planners in SAF/AAZ, apparently one plans while the other assesses effects and results. The other two military service secretariats do not appear to employ special planners.

In a report which debunks UFO research in general and that about the Roswell incidents in particular, it is curious that SAF/AAZ should draw new, unprecedented attention to itself among UFO researchers. On page 11, the report states, in effect, that if a UFO Special Access Program office were to exist in the Air Force, SAF/AAZ would be that office and that, looking within itself, it finds nothing of the kind. It would be hard to imagine a more self serving statement vis-a-vis the Congressional investigation of the Roswell incident. The Weaver report seems, regrettably, poorly contrived and defensively crafted to foil the outcome of the General Accounting Office's investigation.

The General Accounting Office Report:

In late July 1995 the GAO delivered its report to Congressman Steve Schiff's office. Rather than quoting from the actual report,39 I here reproduce part of the press release issued from SchifPs office in Washington, DC, dated 28 July 1995, which encapsulates the GAO's findings:

Congressman Steve Schiff today released the General Accounting Office (GAO) report detailing results of a records audit related to events surrounding a crash in 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, and the military response.

The 20-page report is the result of constituent information requests to Congressman Schiff and the difficulty he had getting answers from the Department of Defense in the now 48-year-old controversy.

Schiff said important documents, which may have shed more light on what happened at Roswell, are missing. `The GAO report states that the outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) for this period of time were destroyed without proper authority.' Schiff pointed out that these messages would have shown how military officials in Roswell were explaining to their superiors exactly what happened.

`It is my understanding that these outgoing messages were permanent records, which should never have been destroyed. The GAO could not identify who destroyed the messages, or why.' But Schiff pointed out that the GAO estimates that the messages were destroyed over 40 years ago, making further inquiry about their destruction impractical . . .

The Roswell incident is unique in that so many have come forward with corroborative evidence, yet it is not an isolated case. Although the majority of military and civilian personnel reporting the incidents described have declined to have their names published, their testimony is equally deserving of our consideration.

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