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Chapter 12
Critiquing the Roswell Critics
2003 MUFON paper by Stanton T. Friedman, Nuclear Physicist-Lecturer, author of Top Secret Majic and Crash at Corona: the US Military Retrieval and Cover-up of a UFO
*COPYRIGHT 2003, Stanton T. Friedman, Fredericton, New Brunswick reproduced by permission of the author
It has been 25 years since I began the civilian investigation of the Roswell Incident involving the recovery by the United States Government of the wreckage of a crashed flying saucer and it’s alien occupants near Roswell, New Mexico, (and another one in the Plains of San Augustin at the same time) in early July, 1947. Because of all the media attention, documentaries, books, papers, TV programs, videos, motion pictures, etc., Roswell has become a household name symbolizing flying saucer. Along with the trickle of investigation by serious researchers, there has been a flood of criticism of every aspect of the Roswell story. Unfortunately, the critics almost always follow the 4 basic rules of debunkers: A. What the public doesn’t know, I am not going to tell them. B. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up. C. If you can’t attack the data, attack the people. D. Do your research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble. It seems past time to shine the light of reason on the multitude of attacks, especially when they come from the hallowed halls of academia. Fancy footnoted language is no substitute for careful in-depth investigation. A crashed saucer (actually 2) really was recovered near Roswell. The criticisms do NOT stand up to detailed evaluation.
BACKGROUND Contrary to popular opinion, modern UFO history did NOT begin with the Roswell Incident of early July, 1947. Instead it was the culmination of two weeks of massive press coverage of reports of flying saucers, flying discs, even flying platters that began with experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold’s June 24, 1947, daylight observation of 9 strange looking, more or less crescent shaped, craft winding their way through the peaks of the Cascade mountains of Washington State. He timed their flight between two mountains and knowing the distance between the two peaks and their apparent distance from him, he computed their speed as between 1200-1600 miles per hour. Considering that the world speed record for aircraft at that time was less than 700mph (Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier came 3 months later in the X-1 rocket), Arnold thought they must be recently developed new revolutionary American aircraft. After all, the atomic bomb and a host of other new military technologies had been developed in secret. He reported his sighting to the press which had no reason to doubt his story. He was an experienced pilot. Assiduous research by a number of people has determined that there were at least 2000 cases, mostly in the United States, though sightings in several other countries had been noted, over the next few weeks. The newspaper headlines of that July 4 weekend were chock full of reports. There was, as might be expected, a flurry of silly explanations (motes in the eye, Russian discus throwers, ad nauseum) as well, and a clear cut indication of government concern because of the potential danger to national security, if these high performance aircraft were flown by enemies of the United States. Thus, it is not surprising that Lieutenant Walter Haut’s Roswell, New Mexico, press release at about noon, Roswell time, (2PM New York Time) got so much attention in evening newspapers from Chicago West on July 8. It was the culmination of two weeks of people waiting with baited breath to know what was going on. According to Haut and Roswell press people, calls came in from all over the world to try to find out more than was stated in the brief release. Calls came to the newspapers, the radio stations, the Sheriff’s office, and, of course, the Roswell Army Air Force Base, home of the 509th composite bomb group, which had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and during tests in the Pacific in 1946. Major Jesse Marcel, whose name is featured in the press release, was the Intelligence Officer for the 509th. Haut was the Public Relations Officer though he had been a bombardier during WWII and flew on many flights attacking Japan and also dropped the instrument package after one of the 2 atomic bomb explosions in the Pacific in 1946. The base commander was Colonel William Blanchard, West Point Grad, class of 1938, who went on to serve as Operations Officer for the Strategic Air Command and Inspector General for the Air Force and was a Four Star General serving as vice-chief of staff of the USAF when he died of a massive heart attack at the Pentagon in May,1966.
There were other important actors as the drama moved through the day. Marcel and some wreckage (only a tiny portion of that which remained on the Foster Ranch) were flown, at Blanchard’s orders, to Fort Worth Army Air Field (later Carswell Air Force Base) where Marcel was instructed by Blanchard’s boss, General Roger Ramey, head of the 8th Air Force, to say nothing. Ramey’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Thomas Jefferson DuBose, had taken telephoned orders from Ramey’s boss, General Clements McMullen, in Washington, DC , to get the press off the Army Air Force’s back, no matter what it took; to send some of the wreckage that came in with Marcel to DC with one of his colonel couriers; and never to talk about it again. DuBose told me this at his home. Ramey followed orders, had wreckage from a radar reflector weather balloon combination brought in, and the real wreckage carried away. Famous pictures were taken of the “wreckage” by Fort Worth Star Telegram photographer, J. Bond Johnson. Two pictures were taken with Marcel and the phoney stuff and one with Ramey and the phoney wreckage, and another more famous one taken with Ramey, and Dubose and the wreckage. Ramey is holding some sort of barely legible (with sophisticated computer evaluation) memo in his hand that much recent investigation seems to show deals with the crash retrieval, judging by the fine work of Dr. David Rudiak of California.
On July 9, newspapers across the country, this time including all the morning papers as well, published the cover-up stories with headings like “Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer“. The pictures were published over the next few days and the story was quickly dismissed as a false alarm. The one newspaper that was really different was the Los Angeles Herald Express, of course also an evening paper, whose front page headline on Tuesday, July 8, Sunset Edition (late racing results), read “Army Finds Flying Saucer” across the full width of the page with a smaller type full width headline underneath “General Believes It Is Radar Weather Gadget”. The article had now grown to 15 column inches from the original release (only 5 column inches in the Spokane Chronicle and only 3” Chicago Daily News).The actual text says the find occurred “some time last week”.
There is very little about Roswell in UFO books and articles published prior to “The Roswell Incident” (Ref. 1) by William L. Moore and Charles Berlitz in 1980. Bill and I had done more than 90% of the research. Ted Bloecher’s “The UFO Wave of 1947” (Ref.2), which lists more than 850 cases, only mentions Roswell in passing as a hoax. Bloecher had only looked at newspapers in towns which he visited as an actor. Frank Edwards’ book “Flying Saucers Serious Business” (Ref. 3) devotes a half page to the story and includes several mistakes.
Bobbi Ann Slate and I in the early 1970s had heard a good story from Lydia Sleppy who worked at a radio station in Albuquerque about a reporter from the station’s Roswell affiliate calling and starting to dictate a story about a crashed saucer when the teletype story she was typing was interrupted by an FBI message to stop the transmission. I was able to track down a few of the people Lydia mentioned, but got only so far. I didn’t get on the trail again until a TV station manager in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while waiting for a late reporter to interview me, in early 1978, suggested I talk to a Jesse Marcel over in Houma, Louisiana, who had handled wreckage from one of the saucers I was interested in, when he was in the military. The manager had read the original press story in 1947, but Jesse would tell him nothing more when they became ham radio buddies after Jesse left the service and moved to Houma. I located him the next day and he told me his story without recalling the exact dates. Months later I heard in Bemidji, Minnesota, about the Barney Barnett story of another saucer crash in NM, this time with strange bodies. Bill Moore, with whom I shared the stories, found the accounts of the crash in newspapers at the U. of Minnesota Library. This gave us names of people like Haut and Ramey and DuBose and Ft. Worth Military weatherman, Irving Newton, and the rancher William “Mack” Brazel. My quest for truth about the events has not yet finished... 25 years later.
FIRST ATTACKS It didn’t take long after the publication of “The Roswell Incident” for the attacks to begin, and they haven’t stopped as the case has drawn more and more media attention with the Showtime semi-fictional movie “Roswell”, with the blockbuster movie “Independence Day”, with more books such as those by Randle and Schmitt (Refs. 4 and 5 ) Mantle and Hessemann ( Ref. 6), Don Berliner’s and my “Crash at Corona” (Ref.7), with all the fanfare of the 50th anniversary celebration which brought tens of thousands of visitors to Roswell along with over 300 accredited journalists, and Philip Corso’s exploitation book “The Day After Roswell” (Ref. 8). Phil Klass was, as would certainly be expected, a very vocal critic. In Ref. 9, I noted more than 20 factual mistakes he had made in his treatment of Roswell. This wasn’t too surprising, since he had not been to Roswell, nor talked to any of the witnesses, nor done much digging into the voluminous contemporary press coverage despite his being Washington based with ready access to the huge periodicals file of the Library of Congress.
The loudest criticism of Roswell came from the United States Air Force attacks. First was the huge “The Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert” (Ref. 10) by Air Force Disinformation Specialist Colonel Richard L. Weaver. Unfortunately, Weaver provided the fiction, making an apparently effective attempt to tabloidize the story with such gems as this “In 1978, an article appeared in a tabloid newspaper, the National Inquirer (sic) which reported the former intelligence officer, Marcel, claimed that he had recovered UFO debris near Roswell in 1947. Also in 1978, a UFO Researcher, Stanton Friedman, met with Marcel and began investigating the claim that the material Marcel handled was from a crashed UFO”. The fact of the matter is that the Enquirer story wasn’t published until 1980, after Bill Moore and I had talked to 62 witnesses. I was the one who gave Marcel’s story and his contact information to reporter Robert Pratt who had been the liaison between the Enquirer and a Blue Ribbon Panel whose job it was to determine the best UFO case each year. I had met Bob, had seen a number of his articles, and was favourably impressed. Weaver makes it sound as though Marcel went to the Enquirer, and I get my leads from Enquirer articles. Of course, he doesn’t mention my scientific background. Dr. Charles Ziegler (“The UFO Crash at Roswell: the Genesis of a Modern Myth”, Ref. 11) went a step farther than Weaver with this totally baseless personal attack on Marcel, and subsequently on me, with these silly comments “Jesse Marcel had-- for purely psychological rewards-- related his tale to friends, some of who were UFO buffs, before he came to the attention of literary traditors. As his notoriety grew he gave his story to the National Enquirer, a tabloid that admittedly pays its informants.” Apparently Dr. Ziegler likes writing fiction and character assassinations from his armchair. The real myth is that there is no reason to say Roswell involved an alien spacecraft. He naturally names no friends to whom Marcel spoke. He provides no evidence Marcel was paid, or even knew any UFO buffs. I know I wasn’t paid. I know that Marcel had told Johnny Allen, the TV station manager, nothing when later asked. I went to Marcel. He didn’t come to me. His 1979 testimony to me is in my documentary “UFOs ARE Real!”, Ref.12.
For what it is worth, the term traditor, according to my Webster’s Dictionary, means “A traitor of early Christian times who surrendered the scriptures or sacred vessels and betrayed other Christians during the Roman persecutions”. To say this is obscure is an understatement, but it sounds impressive. Ziegler also wrote “Friedman states ‘I am convinced that the evidence is overwhelming that Planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles whose origin is off the Earth’. This last sentence is the very definition of “true believer”. As noted in the abstract, one of the rules for debunkers is “don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up”.
Quite apparently Ziegler doesn’t understand the term “evidence“. I start my college lectures “Flying Saucers ARE Real!” by reviewing 5 large scale scientific studies which have been read by fewer than 2% of the attendees.I raise the objections of the debunkers and demolish them with facts rather than ignoring them. In fact, it is people like Klass and Ziegler who are the “true believers” and who refuse to let the facts stand in the way of their conclusions. These are based on their assuming, without investigation, that since there is nothing to the notion of extraterrestrial visitations, there couldn’t possibly have been a crash of an ET spacecraft at Roswell or anyplace else. Furthermore it is their assumption that secrets such as Roswell could not be kept for more than 50 years. One of the most important rules for debunkers is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Dr. Michael Schermer, editor of Skeptic Magazine, has made loud proclamations that he would only believe in flying saucers if he was handed an alien body!!
Weaver’s monstrous report contains other examples of his lack of honesty. For example, he quotes at length from the Roswell Daily Record July 9 story which included a long “interview” with Rancher Mack Brazel. Weaver leaves out the last sentence “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.” Brazel had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch. Weaver mentions an FBI memo of July 8 and gives this as a quote “… the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector.. Disc and balloon being transported “…He casually omits this clause after radar reflector “But that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out this belief.” which reverses the meaning provided by his very selective choice of data. Despite the size of the report, he doesn’t include the memo!
Weaver goes on and on about Project Mogul as a super secret project which had to be responsible for the Roswell wreckage. He doesn’t point out that several launches had been allowed to fall to earth after being tracked for a while and were not tracked further or recovered. Some high security!! It was only the goal of the Mogul Project --to listen for Soviet Atomic explosions with a constant altitude balloon train that was classified. Never does he mention that the newspapers on July 8 noted that the wreckage had been found last week, which hardly matches the selected Mogul launches of early June. The rancher had been in the area just a few days earlier. The Mogul neoprene weather balloons turn to dust in the hot sunshine within weeks. Weaver claims he interviewed all those who had been on the crash site or handled wreckage or talked to witnesses. This is a flat out lie. He didn’t talk to the late Judd Roberts, who managed the radio station in town, to Brazel’s neighbor Loretta Procter who handled some of the material, nor to Dr. Jesse Marcel, who also handled some material, nor to Bill Brazel, Mack’s son, who handled material.
Weaver did talk to retired USAF Colonel Sheridan W. Cavitt who was told that Weaver had clearances for everything. Some people have falsely claimed that Cavitt was told he could say anything to anybody. Cavitt, who had earlier gone so far as to deny even being at the base in early July, 1947, and whose wife had told Bill Moore that Cavitt wouldn’t tell him anything because he had been told not to, suddenly recalled the event with great clarity with this statement: “The area of this debris was very small about 20 feet square and the material was spread on the ground, but there was no gouge or crater or other obvious sign of impact. I remember recognizing this material as being consistent with a weather balloon. We gathered up some of this material which would easily fit into one vehicle ”. Even the RDR article of July 9, stated that the wreckage covered an area 200 yards in diameter. Jesse Marcel in our first conversation and on camera in my movie “UFOs ARE Real” (Ref.12) stated that the debris field extended more than half a mile and was hundreds of yards wide. Rancher Brazel’s primary concern was that his sheep wouldn’t cross the debris field.. hardly a problem with a 20 feet square, small mass of balloon material. It appears that Weaver had suggested Cavitt had seen a weather balloon rather than a MOGUL assembly which included 20-25 weather balloons connected with string and with various pressure monitors, sonobuoys, foil radar reflectors, ballast assemblies. The total assemblage ran about 500 foot long and would hardly fit in an area 20’ square. It would certainly NOT fit in one vehicle. Clearly if that is all there was, Brazel would have tucked the junk into his truck and brought it into town and Marcel and Cavitt would never have had to go out to the site. In short, the late Colonel Cavitt, receiving a government pension, VA medical care, etc, was lying through his teeth as was Colonel Weaver.
Engineer Robert Galganski has shown in a detailed report (Ref.13) that the amount of material in Ramey’s office was only a tiny fraction of that included in a Mogul Assembly. Some TV programs, especially the history channel, have been completely off the wall with their Roswell shows.… showing a tiny bundle of material, using a huge polyethylene teardrop shaped balloon instead of the 2 dozen standard weather balloons. No such polyethylene Mogul had been launched prior to the Roswell saucer recovery. The foil that was a part of the radar reflectors used in MOGUL could be easily torn by a child. The balsa sticks with the foil used for radar reflectors were easily broken, unlike the real wreckage which could not be broken, cut, or burned, and which had strange pastel markings on the I-beam shaped pieces. The real foil was extraordinarily strong, as were other light weight materials, and was a memory metal. It could be bent many times on itself, but would unfold on its own. This was certainly not true of the radar reflector material.
USAF second Volume Weaver claimed in his Volume that it was the last word from the USAF about Roswell. Not surprisingly, once again he wasn’t telling the truth. On June 24, 1997, the 50th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in Washington State, the USAF had a press conference in which they announced the publication of “The Roswell Report: Case Closed”, Ref.14, by USAF Captain James McAndrew who had assisted Weaver in his big report. This Volume was only 231 pages long . As one might expect, based on Weaver’s massive misrepresentation (Ref. 15 has many more details of the deception than given above) it was grossly misleading. I happened to be in England the day of the release and couldn’t believe my ears when listening to the Press Conference on TV. Fortunately, a reporter had noted that the Crash Test Dummies supposedly responsible for reports of alien bodies, hadn’t been dropped before 1953.... Well, people’s memories were fallible!!! Never mind the newspaper articles and all the first hand testimony. When I returned home and obtained a copy of the report, it was even sillier than just inventing time travel for crash test dummies. A map used three times to show where the dummies were dropped makes it clear that none were dropped at the location Southeast of Corona or at the Plains of San Agustin crash site more than 100 miles west.
CRASH TEST DUMMIES? I managed to locate and meet with the retired Colonel (Raymond Madson) who had directed the CTD program. He emphatically noted that, for the tests to have any meaning, the dummies had to be the same size and weight as pilots, namely 6’ tall and 175 pounds, as is clear from the pictures in the report showing Madson with a dummy... Hardly small aliens. McAndrew falsely claims the Don Berliner and I treated two of his very well qualified witnesses, Dr. C.B. Moore and Duke Gildenberg, badly when we met separately with each of them in New Mexico. We did not. We did agree afterwards that neither Moore nor Duke seemed to know anything more about Roswell then was in the Roswell Daily Record article “Harassed Rancher… of July 9. We knew that Brazel had been brought back to town by the Army Air Force and given a new tale to tell, as reflected in the article.
McAndrew is careful to use positive and negative name calling in his propaganda report. His guys are well qualified, but the rest of us are UFO Theorists or UFO Proponents. He not only suggests time travel for crash test dummies, but for outstanding pilot Joseph Kittinger who ludicrously claims that, as he was then a red head, he was responsible for the two completely independent stories I had heard about a nasty red haired officer and a black sergeant. Glen Dennis mentioned having seen them at the base hospital and Gerald Anderson out on the Plains. Kittinger was indeed at the Roswell Base (By then labelled Walker Air Field) hospital, but not in 1947 or 1953, but 1959. Talk about stretching the truth!! McAndrew says nothing about the black sergeant.
MOGUL?? McAndrew includes a detailed layout drawing of a Mogul Balloon train with its radar reflectors, balloons and other gear. However, in the caption he has the gall to state “Mogul Balloon train similar to one found northwest of Roswell, N.M., in June, 1947, which contains all of the “strange materials as described as a part of a flying disc”. This is a flat out lie. The USAF has provided no pieces of memory foil, no very light weight I-beams which could not be burned, cut or broken, no supposed toy manufacturer tape with colored flowers, no evidence that the materials photographed in General Ramey’s office even came from a Mogul as opposed to a conventional weather balloon, and certainly no very strong and very light weight pieces of metal that could not be dented with a sledge hammer. Several things have made it easier for the critics to attack Roswell, despite the overwhelming evidence that crashed saucers were recovered on the Foster Ranch and over in the plains of San Augustin For a while there seemed to be just too many crash sites. Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt made a big deal of the testimony of supposed insider, very well connected, first hand witness Frank Kaufmann in Ref.5. Unfortunately, while Frank told great stories, it has finally now been accepted, even by Dr. Randle, that Frank was making it up as he went along. Very recent articles (Ref. 15 and 16) note that Frank had faked documents, claimed positions he did not hold, literally made up stories about his role (NONE) in the crash retrieval, made up a description of the vehicle and the bodies. Frank was a good artist. Don Schmitt had caught on sooner. Kent Jeffrey for a long time bought Frank’s story as did Linda Moulton Howe and Dr. Robert M. Wood and Ryan Wood, despite the lack of supporting evidence and the many inconsistencies in Frank’s stories. I have noted these in the past such as in my MUFON 2000 paper (Ref.17). At least Frank had the decency to admit in 1999 that he had not told me the truth in 1995 about Colonel Blanchard and Jesse Marcel going out in the middle of the night to retrieve a crashed saucer and alien bodies at the Corn Ranch site. At one point there was an attempt to make the Jim Ragsdale story match Frank’s story, though it never made sense for Jim to be out in the middle of nowhere with a married woman. Jim insisted to me and others that he was talking about a site on the Pine Lodge Road well west of Roswell with trees, camping areas, etc on a wooded hillside. Of course, the former owners (McKnight Family) of the Corn ranch had long ago said one couldn’t get to Frank’s crash site without a horse…no roads. Frank’s story of the middle of the night trip with Blanchard and Marcel never made any sense. The notion that a flat bed truck was sent for and came out from the base and came, and returned, to the base that same night with the saucer on board also made no sense. Cross country? Crash investigators always make an effort to view a debris field in situ and photograph it in detail. There certainly weren’t any tourists to worry about at the site in 1947. Always very questionable from the start was the claim by Kaufmann to me, Schmitt, and Randle that Blanchard would have left the base without first having a report from a spotter plane. As I have noted in Ref. 18, Randle’s comment in Ref.16 “Challenges {to Kaufmann} from the outside seemed born more of politics inside the UFO field than investigative analysis” seems extraordinarily self serving and seems more a projection of his own failure to investigate Frank’s claims on to those of us who did seek evidence and found no reality but many inconsistencies UFOS?YES. ROSWELL, NO! Some of the attacks on the legitimacy of the Roswell crash have been made by people who accept the notion that Earth is indeed being visited by alien space craft, but do not believe that Roswell represents the crash of such a vehicle. Kal Korff’s book which I noted in Ref.17 is one. Perhaps the best of the 3 anti-Roswell books (Klass, Korff, and Pflock) all published by the CSICOP connected Prometheus Press, is Karl Pflock’s “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe“, Ref. 19. He correctly perceived that there was no backing for the Kaufmann case which has colored so much of Randle’s writing about Roswell. Unfortunately, though he accepts the notion of alien visitation, his anti-Roswell stance seems to be based primarily on character assassination and on the notion that absence of evidence is evidence for absence.
Pflock blindly accepted Robert Todd’s vicious attacks on Jesse Marcel (Senior and Junior) even though these had been rebutted in detail by David Rudiak on his website (____).Todd has a history of creating scenarios having no basis other than his imagination. No wonder McAndrew and Weaver said nice things about him and his Mogul research. Pflock tried to dismiss Colonel Blanchard’s ordering the press release to be issued by Walter Haut as the act of a loose cannon. Perhaps Blanchard was to some people a loose cannon. Pflock doesn’t establish a connection. Surely we must consider Blanchard’s very impressive record before and after the Roswell Incident. He was West Point Class of 1938, was head of Operations on Tinian from which the Enola Gay took off to bomb Hiroshima. He was both Commander of the Roswell Army Air Field and head of the 509th. He went on to get 4 more congressionally approved promotions winding up as a 4 star General and Vice Chief of Staff of the USAF when he died of a massive heart attack at the Pentagon in 1966. See his obituary in the New York Times in early June, 1966.
Among the many positions he held in the 19 years after Roswell were Chief of Operations for SAC (Many megatons of Nuclear weapons ready to be dropped),and Inspector General of the Air Force. Yes, as Karl notes, he was General Curt Lemay’s fair haired boy. The notion that he was irresponsible in how he handled Roswell seems patently absurd. He surely wasn’t punished. He later received a very enthusiastic professional review from General Roger Ramey as well.
Pflock also tried to dismiss the testimony of Oliver W. “Pappy” Henderson an outstanding pilot at Roswell, who told his wife Sappho in 1980 after seeing a newspaper article about Roswell, that he had flown some of the wreckage to Wright Patterson Air Force Base and was aware of the bodies. Len Stringfield had published Sappho’s story, but without doing any further investigation. He wouldn’t tell me where she was, but I found her at the expense of Unsolved Mysteries. I spoke with her, her daughter, her son, her son-in-law and Pappy’s good friend Vere McCarty, who had been his WW 2 bombardier and to whom Pappy had told the story at the last reunion of that group while he could still talk. Pappy had throat cancer, quite possibly from flying VIPs over the atom bomb explosion site in Operations Crossroad in 1946. Sappho had given me the names of 5 old buddies to whom Pappy might have talked. Colonel McCarty wrote me a good letter describing Pappy and the story he told. This helped convince Unsolved Mysteries to use Sappho in their September, 1989, show about Roswell, which I had instigated. After the show Sappho told me that Pappy’s close friend John Kromschroeder, DDS, had also been told the story by Pappy on John’s honor as a former Naval Officer not to reveal it, way back in the late 1970s. Pappy had also handed John a small piece of wreckage which John described as being sort of a combination of metal and plastic. He had to return the piece and it has never been found.
Pflock tries to get rid of Kromschroeder’s testimony by proclaiming that he couldn’t be believed because he was interested in the Billy Meier case and because Pappy was supposedly well known as a practical joker who made up the story and was actually showing people a small piece of a V-2 that he had picked up. Karl has not, so far as I know, talked to Sappho Henderson or her daughter or John Kromschroeder . The reader can evaluate them on his or her own by reviewing their testimony in the 105 minute video “Recollections of Roswell” (Ref. 20). I talked to all of these as well as to Pappy’s son, and his son-in-law who also handled the piece of wreckage, and were well aware of the piece of a V-2. Colonel McCarty, who recently died was a pall bearer at Pappy’s funeral in 1986. I spoke with his wife as well as to him and his son. None had any reason to disbelieve Pappy’s Roswell story.
Not only was character assassination important for Karl, but he commented at length about all the documents that didn’t mention Roswell. Most were only classified Secret not Top Secret and none were TOP SECRET Code Word. We know from Wilbert Smith’s comment, Ref.21, that Flying Saucers were considered the most classified subject in the United States even more so than the H-Bomb. The inner workings surely must have been a black project hence the need for TOP SECRET Code Word such as UMBRA or ULTRA or MAJIC (as in the Majestic 12 Documents). Karl from his CIA and DOD experience knows well that very highly classified documents cannot be referenced in documents having a lower classification. The CIA could not, or more likely would not, locate 4 Briefings for President Elect Eisenhower on National Security Matters given between Nov. 4, 1952 and January 9, 1953, by General Walter Bedell Smith (Director of Central Intelligence and MJ-12 Member) as noted in a letter from Smith to President Truman on January 9, 1953,(included in Ref. 22). I even gave them the dates of 2 of the briefings.
It is interesting that back in 1979, the National Security Agency found 156 old UFO documents which we much later determined were classified TOP SECRET UMBRA. Unfortunately, when these were finally released in 1996, all but one line or 2 on each page was whited out. The 1979 Affidavit justifying releasing none to Federal Judge Gesell was also, when more lightly (20% vs. 80%) classified in 1996, with black censorship markings, marked TOP SECRET UMBRA. It took me 5 years to get 4(of 14) CIA UFO Documents which had been located by the NSA in their Court Ordered search, but somehow were “missed” by the CIA in its earlier court ordered search. When finally released , the security markings were blacked out, but were almost certainly TOP SECRET Code Word. Some of the pages had all but 8 or 10 words blacked out. The point here is that, with this background, why would any rational person expect to get detailed TOP SECRET Code Word UFO documents? Surely it is not rational to suggest, as several Roswell deniers have suggested, that there was no such data since we don’t have it.
It has also been claimed by Klass and others that since General Nathan Twining, in July, 1947, Head of Air Materiel Command, in his famous Sept. 23 , 1947, memo (only Classified SECRET) said “h. Due consideration must be given the following…(2)The lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects” , therefore supposedly “proving” that there was no crashed saucer recovered near Roswell or anyplace else in July, 1947.A dose of reality is needed here. Surely he couldn’t mention a TS Code word black budget document or Operation Majestic 12 established to deal with crashed saucers in such a SECRET document. Colonel Madson told me that while at Wright Patterson AFB in the 1950s, he was given a bad rating by his supervisor who wasn’t aware that he was working on the black budget U-2 project. Madson’s boss on that program had to fix things.
Over and over again I find that the critics buy into false notions by repeating the false claims of others. For example the critics have as their bible the Harassed Rancher story of July 9 but ignore all the stories of July 8 indicating that the wreckage was found “last week”. Dr. Charles A. Ziegler states in Ref.11: “Actually according to his contemporary account, Brazel found the wreckage on 14 June and considered the incident so trivial that he did not collect the wreckage until 4 July. He visited Corona on 5 July and learned about flying disks there, but apparently he considered them to be associated with an American military project. In any case, he did not consider the matter important enough to make a special trip on 6 July. Instead he did so on 7 July, when he had to visit town to sell some wool.”. This is fiction.
Ziegler can’t bring himself to seriously consider that Marcel and Cavitt had gone out on July 6, Sunday, in response to Brazel coming in to the Sheriff’s office that date, had gone back with him , spent overnight, viewed the field full of debris on July 7, returned to Roswell late on the 7th. Marcel stopped at home late on the 7th and showed his son some wreckage.. a small portion of what had been left behind. Brazel was brought in to town on July 9 by the military (Loretta Procter’s husband saw him in the company of military people, but was not even acknowledged by Brazel.) Brazel’s son has told of his father being kept at the base for some time. Jesse Marcel Jr. also gives an account consistent with July 6 and 7. The contemporary accounts were written on July 8 not July 9. The doctored version appeared on the 9th and still forms the false basis for the USAF’s Mogul explanation. Remember that the USAF actually launched a weather balloon radar reflector combination for the press over at Alamogordo Army Air Field on July 9th. The front page headline in the Alamogordo newspaper (July 10) was “Fantasy of Flying Disc Is Explained” here. The article had 3 pictures. The people involved worked for Twining’s AMC. He had arrived there on July 7.
“UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth” by Ziegler, an adjunct professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University; Benson Saler, an anthropology Professor at Brandeis; and C.B. Moore, directly involved in the Mogul Project and a Professor Emeritus of atmosphere physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, NM, was published by Smithsonian Institution Press. No mention is made of Moore’s excellent UFO sighting with a theodolite which has been described by Dr. James E McDonald and who, according to a newly published book by Ann Druffel, was very sympathetic to Jim’s views on UFOs.
CONSPIRACY? An equally prestigious publisher, Yale University Press, in 2001 issued “Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America” (Ref. 22) by Dr. Robert Alan Goldberg, a Professor of History at the University of Utah. Chapter 6 of the seven chapters is “The Roswell Incident”. This 42 page Chapter has an impressive list of 114 references. To his credit, Goldberg did communicate with me via phone and email. He still manages to get the sequence of my involvement with Jesse Marcel Sr. and the Barney Barnett story wrong. He, too, buys into the July 9 Roswell Daily Record article. In Chapter 7 he makes this comment speaking of conspiracy thinking: “The mix of dedication, ambition, and entrepreneurship ensures intensity and a continuous stream of product, sequel and rerun. The heart of the community is a male preserve inhabited by intelligent and creative individuals like Robert Welch, Pat Robertson, Oliver Stone, Louis Farrakhan, Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman. Well educated and immersed in the organizational subculture, they are nevertheless disparate in background and political, social and religious orientation. Their personal histories reveal fixation with a cause, but not mental disorder or marginality.” I suppose I should be flattered by an eminent historian’s psychobabble. There are many more comments that could be made about Goldberg’s “investigation” of Roswell. However, perhaps it would be best to just illustrate Goldberg’s armchair theorist inaccuracy with two quotes:
“The Roswell newspaper accounts are the only shards of physical evidence that exist to document these happenings”. His references don’t include the July 8 account! I guess it was too much trouble for an academic historian to review the myriad of other articles in bigger newspapers. I don’t normally think of newspaper accounts as physical evidence, but obviously absence of pieces of wreckage in Goldberg’s hands means there is none, anywhere.
“Speaking of the MJ-12 papers, “Evidence of malfeasance was plentiful. Critics noted that the date format did not conform to government style, the papers carried no top secret registration number, military titles were improperly noted and signatures appeared to be grafted on to the document. Anachronistic usages like media and impacted further betrayed the find”. So much nonsense in so little space. Malfeasance might indeed be a better term. Note:
A. When one checks documents in government archives one finds many different date formats. I even found the exact same date format (day, month, comma ,year as in 18 November, 1952)in documents written by 2 of the MJ-12 members. This has, of course, been noted before, but again “What people don’t know, the skeptic won’t tell them.” Why let the facts get in the way of a good, but false, explanation?
B. I had published two formerly TOP SECRET documents in my 1990 “Final Report on Operation Majestic 12” (Ref. 22). Neither had TOP SECRET Registration numbers and the archivists at the Marshall and Eisenhower Libraries both indicated that often such numbers were not used. Dr. Herbert Pankratz, Archivist at the Eisenhower Library, went so far as to write me on January 9, 2003, “we have numerous documents classified as “TOP SECRET” which do not have control numbers on them.”
C. The use of Generic military titles (General to cover Brigadier, Major, Lieutenant, and 4 star Generals; and Admiral to cover Vice, Rear, and 4 star Admirals, is quite acceptable especially in a mixed group of civilian and military personnel. General Arthur E. Exon, a former commandeer of Wright Patterson AF Base saw no objection. In addition, the listing written in 1952 designates the members appointed to MJ-12 in 1947. Several of the ranks had changed.
D. As I noted in Ref. 18, the signature (singular not plural) of President Truman might well have been grafted on the copy of the Truman Forrestal memo of Sept. 24, 1947, since the original sent to James Forrestal, who had died in 1949, might not have been available. Dr. Vannevar Bush, who is mentioned in the memo, almost certainly would have had an unsigned copy as would briefing officer Hillenkoetter, also mentioned, by title, in the memo. Both had certainly received signed memos from President Truman. E. According to the Oxford dictionary both media and impacted had been in use prior to 1952. Is it too much trouble to go to the library? The U. of Utah surely has a good one.
I find it fascinating that neither Dr. Goldberg in Ref. 22, nor Dr. Randle in Ref.24, even mentions the very academic analysis of the language of the Eisenhower Briefing Document by world class linguistics expert Dr. Roger Westcott as noted in Ref.23. Westcott concluded, after studying 27 different documents known to be by briefing officer Hillenkoetter, that he had also written the Eisenhower Briefing Document.
The point here is that (perhaps well meaning) academics have pitched in, read a lot of published material, mainly investigations done by others and reached conclusions without doing much if any investigation themselves. With very few exceptions they haven’t had courage enough to buck the predominant academic mind set about UFOs, namely that there is nothing to stories of flying saucers and government cover-ups. Their selective choice of data, positive and negative name calling, unwillingness to do the work in the trenches, are typical of propagandists not scholars.
The academics are of, course, not alone in their noisy negativism from the lofty peaks of academia. Airline Pilot Kent Jeffrey, who had originally championed the Roswell cause, turned 180 degrees . The switch, as expressed in an 18 page article in the MUFON Journal (Ref. 25), was based on the same false reasoning and ignorance of security that led him to champion the cause in the first place. He had blindly accepted Frank Kaufmann. He blindly accepted the notion that because there was a curled phone cord in the Alien Autopsy, the footage must be phoney, so he didn’t check with the Phone Company. I am convinced the footage is phoney, as noted in Ref. 26, but had checked with the Phone Company and found that such cords had been invented in the late 1930s and in use since them. Kent couldn’t see a national security aspect to Roswell, despite the obvious fact that such technology in the hands of our enemies could be very powerful, etc etc. Kent didn’t even understand that not everybody who had ever been based at Roswell Army Air Field or WPAFB would have known about Roswell, and that those who did, would not have told him what they knew.
NEW YORK TIMES Press coverage of UFOs has almost always been dicey. Many smaller newspapers have covered local stories fairly and honestly. Unfortunately, the major papers and such TV shows as Sixty Minutes, seem to feel that there is no point in covering what for them must be considered a fringe topic. Surely, they seem to believe, if there were alien spacecraft visiting Earth, they, in their infinite wisdom, about all things important, would have known about it. Since they don’t, having spent little effort in the past other than to blindly accept government pronouncements, or those by such noisy negativists as Phil Klass, Paul Kurtz of CSICOP, etc there would be no point in wasting precious man-hours on such a topic. Obviously, there is no evidence worth examining. Instead they have opted to spend their efforts on such earth shaking stories as Monica Lewinski, Elian Gonzales, Gary Condit. It should be no surprise that the Iran Contra scandal was broken by a Lebanese newspaper though much of the activity by Oliver North , et al, was conducted in the front yard of the Washington Post, famous for blowing the lid off the Watergate Scandal.
If any of these so called protectors of the public’s right to know, would spend 10% of the resources put into Watergate or the stories noted above, they could blow the lid off the Cosmic Watergate in less than six months. Joel Achenbach of the Post has written a silly book about UFOs and wrote an even sillier column about Roswell. William Broad, a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist for the New York Times, did do a major piece on Roswell. The 60 column inch article of Sept.18, 1994, began on the upper left quadrant of the front page of the Sunday New York Times, about the best position to get attention in any American newspaper. Unfortunately, he bought the USAF Mogul explanation, as so misleadingly provided by Colonel Weaver, hook, line, and sinker.
Broad interviewed Mogul personnel, but nobody connected with the Roswell events. He disparages the museum, ignores the testimony of Major Marcel and his son Dr. Marcel, and a great deal of other factual data. Naturally we find such pejorative terms as “flying saucer fans, devotees, cultists” . He mentions some Roswell books, but doesn’t mention the only one by a scientist, my “Crash at Corona”, Ref. 7. I wrote an op-ed piece which is included in Reference 15. Of course it wasn’t run. I would strongly recommend the outstanding book “The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up” by Terry Hansen, Ref. 27, for some valuable insights into the dismal failure of the press, especially the major media, to do a fair job of covering the biggest story of the millennium: the overwhelming evidence of visits to planet Earth by alien spacecraft and the recovery and cover-up by the US government of the best data, the bodies and wreckage recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, in July, 1947.
Time Magazine also did a Roswell story to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Roswell using a silly cartoon-like female alien (thick lips, large nose ad nauseum) on the cover with the word Roswell in very large type. It was their largest selling issue of 1997 until the one about Princess Diana’s death. People can go to the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell for free. Time doesn’t give issues nor advertising away. Who is bilking the gullible? To date there have been over 1.35 million visitors to the museum even though Roswell is about 200 miles from Amarillo, El Paso and Albuquerque.
CONCLUSIONS Much as I have tried to find good reasons for rejecting the reality of the Roswell incident, despite the enormous quantity of verbiage that has been published, I have been unable to do so. A psychiatrist would be needed to try to explain the vehemence of the attacks, the frequent resort to massive misrepresentation, false reasoning, selective choice of data along with the phoney stories, the false documents created re Operation Majestic 12 to try to diminish the legitimacy of the real ones. As a nuclear physicist accustomed to dealing with honest people, factual data, an acceptance of some claims as being placed in my gray basket, it has been quite an education. There is no question that the US government recovered two crashed flaying saucers and crews in the New Mexico desert in early July, 1947. The government has been quite successful at withholding the physical remnants and the real paper trail. The challenge for young journalists is to break through the lies. Most first hand witnesses will soon be dead. We need a Daniel Ellsberg to put the truth back on the table.
REFERENCES 1.Moore, William L. and Berlitz, Charles “The Roswell Incident” 1980, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, and several paperback versions. 2.Bloecher, Ted. “Report on The UFO Wave of 1947”, Introduction by Dr. James E. McDonald, 1967. Data on 853 cases 3.Edwards, Frank “Flying Saucers Serious Business” 186 pages. Paperback Bantam Books, 1966 4.Randle, Kevin and Schmitt, Don “UFO Crash at Roswell”, Avon Paperback. 1991, 327 Pages 5.Randle, Kevin and Schmitt, Don “The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell”, M. Evans 1994, 251 Pages. (Avon Paperback, 1994,314 Pages) 6.Mantle, Philip and Hesemann, Michael “Beyond Roswell”, 1998 Marlowe and Company, NY 320 pages 7.Friedman, Stanton T. and Berliner, Don “Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of The Roswell Incident”. 2nd Edition 1997, Trade Paper, Marlowe and Company, New York. Available, autographed by STF, from UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958. Only $10.00 including shipping and Handling. List is 13.95 8.Corso, Philip J. with Birnes, William J. “The Day After Roswell” ,1997, Pocket Books, 341 pages. No references, no Index 9.Friedman, Stanton T. “Flying Saucers, Noisy Negativists and Truth” MUFON paper 1985, 15 pages, only $4.00 from UFORI 10.Weaver, Colonel William L. “The Roswell Report: Truth vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert” US Government Printing Office, 1995, ISBN 0-16-048023-X about 1000 pages. 11.Saler, Benson; Ziegler, Charles A.; Moore, Charles B. “UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth”, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC and London, 1997, 198 pages. 12.“UFOs ARE Real”, Video, 1979, 93 minutes, Only 15$. Includes testimony from Major Jesse Marcel, Dr. Richard Haines, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Dr. James Harder, Travis Walton, Michael Rogers, Betty Hill, Marjorie Fish, Ted Phillips, Stan Friedman, etc. 13.Galganski, Robert A. “The Roswell Debris Field: An Engineer‘s Perspective”, FUFOR, 2002 Available From Arcturus Books, 1443 S.E. Port St. Lucie Blvd., Port St. Lucie, FL 34952. 772-398-0796. $18. + S and H. 14.McAndrew, Captain James “The Roswell Report: Case Closed” 231 pages, US Government Printing Office,1997 15.Friedman, Stanton T. “Roswell Incident, The USAF, and the New York Times“, September 1994. 27 pages, $4.00 from UFORI. 16.Randle, Kevin D “Frank Kaufmann: Roswell Witness”, International UFO Reporter, Center for UFO Studies, Winter, 2002. 17.Rodeghier, Mark “Frank Kaufmann: Roswell Hoaxer” International UFO Reporter, Center for UFO Studies, Winter, 2002 18.Friedman, Stanton T. “Review of “Case MJ-12” by K.D. Randle” January ,2003, 27 pages, $4.00 from UFORI 19.Pflock,Karl “Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe”, Prometheus Books, 2001, 331 pages. 20.“Recollections of Roswell” , Video, 105 Minutes, Testimony from 27 first hand witnesses, $15.00 from UFORI, Including S and H. 21.Smith, Wilbert B. “Memorandum to the Controller of Telecommunications”, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Nov. 21, 1950.Formerly TOP SECRET 22.Goldberg, Robert Alan “Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy In Modern America” 2001, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 354 Pages 23.Friedman, Stanton T. “Final Report on Operation Majestic 12”, 1990. 106 pages, $10.00 UFORI including S. and H. 24.Randle, Kevin D. “ Case MJ-12: The True Story Behind the Government‘s UFO Conspiracies”, Paperback Harper Torch, Harper Collins, December 2002,311 pages. 25.Jeffrey, Kent “ ___, MUFON Journal, June 199_. See rebuttal by S.T. Friedman at www.v-j-enterprises.com/sfpage.html 26. Friedman, Stanton T. “TOP SECRET/MAJIC” 1996, 272 pages, Hard Cover, List $22.95. Only $15.00 including S and H. Autographed from UFORI 27.Hansen, Terry “The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up” 2000, Xlibris Books, also fro
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