The Roswell Incident, July 1947: Part One

Even if you have relatively little or just a casual acquaintance with UFOs, you’ve no doubt heard of the alleged 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. If you’re a serious UFO buff, then Roswell is probably something you have well and truly researched. IMHO, there is a case to be answered here, that to date has not been answered satisfactorily about what really happened in early July, 1947.

Dateline, Roswell, New Mexico, July, 1947:

The basic story is that a civilian farmer came across some debris wreckage located at some distance from the nearest town of Roswell, New Mexico, of something that he could not identify and thus, thinking this an important discovery, ultimately notified the proper authorities, in case the debris was something of significance. The local officials, thinking the debris had to be military in nature, notified the nearby Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). The base commander sent out an intelligence officer who collected some of the material, showing same to his family. After that, he duly reported his findings and eventually, all of the debris was collected, shipped firstly to Texas, then apparently on to another base far removed from the original site. The questions are, what was the nature of the debris; why has the official story of what was discovered so often been changed, and is there anything that can be read into the incident that would lend credibility to the UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH)?

Starting with that point immediately related to the UFO ETH, are unconfirmed tales and rumours of alien bodies associated with the Roswell incident. I mean, it all makes sense if the Roswell incident involved a crashed alien spaceship – you’d expect alien bodies. Unfortunately, that trail is fairly cold, but a trail nonetheless.

However, and unfortunately, recovered ‘alien bodies’ are the biggest ‘giggle’ factor detrimental to any credibility about the Roswell Incident. Why this should be so is beyond me for, again, if UFOs are ‘manned’ by aliens, and if a UFO crashed, then it stands to reason that there will be alien bodies too – alive or dead. Of course one could argue that maybe the UFOs aren’t ‘manned’, but remote controlled drones – we have such things ourselves. Maybe the alien is actually  a form of extraterrestrial artificial intelligence – an onboard machine intelligence that controls/pilots the UFO, and resulting crash debris one couldn’t tell the difference between the remains of the ‘pilot’ from the rest of the nuts and bolts. But back to the bodies – by analogy, on balance, it would seem odd for an airliner to crash and there be no bodies. I find the idea of ‘alien bodies’ to contribute no extra ‘giggle’ factor to the Roswell incident.

However, as if to confirm the UFO ETH, one must point out that the then US Army Air Force admitted publicly, in the media, in newspapers, on radio, that they had captured one of those mysterious (and only recently in the limelight – the modern UFO era was just weeks old) flying discs. No amount of back-pedalling can alter that now historical fact. It’s on the record. Look it up yourself!

Clearly something crash landed near Roswell in New Mexico in July 1947. That’s not under any doubt. Clearly the RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) admitted it had captured a flying disc. That’s not under any dispute. Clearly the RAAF (or on orders from higher USAAF authority – US Army Air Forces) changed the story the next day to one of retrieval of a downed weather balloon. That’s not under dispute. The (now) USAF has in fact changed the story a couple more times in the decades since. It’s still a balloon, but now one that was the top secret Project Mogul (keeping in mind it was the Project Mogul mission, not the materials that were top secret so why gather up and cart away the materials). As to the bodies (those alien bodies noted above) well they were test crash dummies. Unfortunately for that off-the-cuff or off-the-top-of-the-head explanation, test crash dummies weren’t so tested for a few years after the Roswell incident – oops!

Now I would maintain that military personnel would be able to tell the difference between balloon materials, and wreckage from a metallic flying disc (not to mention being able to distinguish alien bodies from mannequins). How could they get it so absolutely originally wrong? I would maintain that ‘the little old lady from Pasadena’ could differentiate between the two.  Anything after the original USAAF ‘it was a crashed disc’ explanation (i.e. – balloons) is absurd. Further, we have statements, including death bed affidavits from key witnesses that reiterate that there was debris from a crashed disc and non-human bodies in evidence. That’s not in dispute either. While there’s a lot of mythology surrounding Roswell, and not all the story has been fully told IMHO, there would seem little doubt that Roswell is as close to a UFO ETH ‘smoking gun’ as we have. It only takes one, out of multi-hundreds of thousands of UFO reports, to seal the evidence for the existence an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).

But wait, there’s more, and I’m not making any of this up. Firstly, forget the dozens of after-the-fact investigators into Roswell and their tomes. The only thing that really counts here is first hand, on-the-spot, eye-witness accounts. When it comes to that, the name Marcel should ring your bells and whistles.

Major Jesse Marcel (Senior) was the Army Air Force (AAF) as it was then called, military officer directed to investigate the report of some mysterious debris scattered outside of town. Now to achieve a rank of Major, in the military, suggests you’ve been around for a while. You’re not some newly commissioned greenhorn Second Louie. It suggests that one is competent enough to distinguish wheat from chaff. So, Major Marcel (Senior), upon on-site investigation of this crashed debris, became so excited about the nature of the material that he actually took some of the debris home to show his family, waking up his young child (Jesse Marcel, Junior) in the middle of the night. It’s the sort of thing a SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) scientist might just as excitedly do if he or she received ‘that’ radio signal from E.T.

That a Major in the US AAF somehow could not tell the difference between debris from a crashed weather balloon (or even in yet another turnaround about-face, a Project Mogul balloon trail – well it’s still just a balloon) and a metallic crashed disc is too implausible or incredible to believe or take seriously. It’s like saying a SETI scientist couldn’t tell the difference between Morse Code and the radio hiss from the Big Bang’s cosmic microwave background radiation, or a dog breeder the difference between a German Shepard and a French Poodle!

Afterwards, of course, that, and all the other debris was collected by and turned over to the local AAF. Because of the unusual and highly suggestive other-worldly nature of the debris, the base commander (Colonel William Blanchard) ordered his public relations officer (First Lieutenant, Walter Haut) to issue a press statement that the AAF at Roswell had collected the crashed remains of one of these new fangled flying discs – or flying saucers as they were first termed. Within 24 hours, higher authority directed that the story be changed and what had actually been recovered was a weather balloon. Major Marcel, the base commander and the press officer, being dutiful military types, just followed orders, made the required about-face turnabout, and said nothing further – then. The actual debris was flown off-site, off the Roswell base, first to Texas (where real weather balloon bits were displayed for a press conference), hence onwards elsewhere (Wright Field as it was then known, now Wright-Patterson AFB, is implicated), but the debris (weather balloon or otherwise) has now apparently vanished off the face of the Earth, unless of course it is still stored under classified wraps which of course is denied.

To be continued...