Intro

For those who sojourn our website and are familiar with how our investigations typically go, you’d know that Rhiannon and I will pick a topic to research and discuss. I’ll post an article normally and Rhiannon makes a video on the topic. However, our investigation into the Roswell incident led us to a divergence of opinion on what exactly happened in July 1947.

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Kenneth Arnold: The Start of the UFO Craze

The events of July 1947 cannot be discussed without first understanding the event that took place in Washington, June 1947. Kenneth Arnold, a respected businessman and aviator, had an unusual experience that gave birth to the modern conception of UFOs and UFO sightings. While flying over Mount Rainier on a search for a downed plane for which there was a reward, he saw nine unusual flying objects traveling at high rates of speed and in unusual directions. He described them as pie-pan and crescent-shaped.

When asked by a local newspaper, he described the movements of the crafts as “a saucer skipping across water.” The newspapers then misquoted him as saying he had seen a flying saucer. The entire conception of flying saucers, the archetypical UFOs, came from this misquote.

It was on July 7th that Arnold suggested what he had seen may be of extraterrestrial origin. That year resulted in over 800 other flying saucer sightings and began the commonality of UFO reports.

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Roswell: July 1947

On June 14th, 1947, local rancher Mac Brazel found, scattered across his farm, a myriad of unusual material. He described it as:

“A large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper, and sticks.”

He also said that on some pieces there were strange hieroglyph-like markings that could not be made out. There was a foil material that, when wrinkled, would straighten itself out, and there were sticks like balsa wood but harder.

The JM Foster ranch, on which Brazel worked, had no electricity, television, or radio, leaving him with no way of knowing about the flying saucer hysteria. It was not until after leaving for Corona, New Mexico, on July 5th that he had heard of flying saucers. Afterwards, he connected them with the debris he had found on the Foster ranch.

After gathering the material on July 6th, he called the Weather Bureau, who advised him to contact the local sheriff, George Wilcox. Wilcox, being baffled by the debris, in turn contacted the RAAF, who sent out star witness Major Jesse Marcel to the Foster ranch.

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Marcel & Cavitt at the Ranch

Marcel, along with Counter Intelligence Corps officer Sheridan Cavitt, ventured to the ranch, gathered as much material as they could, and gave testimony similar in description to that of Brazel. Cavitt is on record as saying he found a small black box on the ranch that could not be opened. Afterwards, they reported their discovery to Colonel William Blanchard.

Blanchard ordered Lt. Walter Haut to make a press release alerting the public of the discovery of this “flying disk.” The subsequent release sparked worldwide interest and frenzy. Blanchard alerted his superior, General Ramey, who ordered the material flown to Fort Worth Army Air Field and quickly dismissed it as that of a radar target and weather balloon.

In the July 9th edition of the Roswell Daily Record, Brazel expressed regret for sharing his find, feeling it had only brought him trouble from the military. He remained firm that, while not knowing exactly what he found, he was sure “it wasn’t a weather balloon.”

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The Incident Forgotten… Until 1978

After the initial debunking of the event, the Roswell incident was forgotten by the public for nearly 30 years. It was not until ufologist Stanton Friedman, in 1978, conducted an interview with Jesse Marcel that the incident was thrust once more into public attention. Marcel denied Ramey’s claim that it was merely a downed weather balloon, asserting it was a flying disk of extraterrestrial origin that the government had covered up 30 years prior.

Friedman and Marcel both claimed that the material pictured in the July 9th edition of the Roswell Daily Record was a weather balloon while the real debris was switched out — a claim refuted by Brig. General Thomas Jefferson Dubose, who hand-delivered the material from the B-29 bomber in a pouch to Ramey’s office.

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Jesse Marcel: The Star Witness

The most important witness — the “rockstar witness,” the single reason we are discussing the Roswell incident some 75 years later — is Maj. Jesse Marcel. Marcel described the material as:

“There was all kinds of stuff: small beams about three-eighths or a half inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. These looked something like balsa wood, and were about of the same weight, except that they were not wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible, and would not burn. There was a great deal of an unusual parchment-like substance which was brown in color and extremely strong, and a great number of small pieces of a metal-like tinfoil, except that it wasn’t tinfoil. I was interested in electronics and kept looking for something that resembled instruments or electronic equipment, but I didn’t find anything. One of the other fellows, Cavitt I think, found a black box several inches square. As there was no apparent way to open this, and since it didn’t appear to be an instrument of any sort, it too was very lightweight. We threw it in with the rest of the stuff. I don’t know what eventually happened to the box, but it went along with the rest of the material we eventually took to Fort Worth.”

When one examines Marcel’s background, it’s easy to see that he is, simply put, an unreliable witness. Marcel claimed to have been a pilot and had been flying since 1928. However, when UFO researcher Kal K. Korff obtained a copy of Marcel’s military record, there was no mention of flying experience. In fact, in 1947, in his “reserve officer carrier brief,” his flying experience was listed as none, and even Ramey in 1948 said that Marcel was not a rated pilot.

This goes against claims he made to ufologists William Moore and Charles Birlitz, whom he told he had experience in combat as a pilot — which we know to be untrue. He also stated he had five Purple Hearts when he had only one or two. If the star witness, Marcel, has been shown to be totally unreliable, it casts serious doubt on the resurrection of the alleged flying saucer crash.

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Was There a Government Cover-Up?

Many who believe that an alien spaceship crashed in Roswell will argue the government merely covered the incident up with the weather balloon story. Is this true? Some have said that the material photographed in Ramey’s office was switched out with the original material. This would seem strange since Marcel claimed that he was photographed with the original material before the switch. Yet Ramey clearly is pictured with the same material.

As mentioned earlier, Thomas Dubose denied this idea and personally hand-delivered the material to Ramey.

Sheridan Cavitt, who accompanied Marcel, said:

“I have reviewed the pictures in the 1991 book by Randle and Schmitt on the UFO crash at Roswell wherein Marcel and Ramey are holding up this material, and it appears to be the same type of material that we picked up from the ranchland. When we got to this location we subsequently located some debris which appeared to me to resemble bamboo-type square sticks one quarter to one half inch, that were very light, as well as some sort of metallic reflecting material that also was very light. I also vaguely remember some sort of black box (like a weather instrument). 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 signs 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; there certainly wasn’t a lot of this material, or enough to make up crates of it for multiple flights.”

Cavit clearly thought the wreckage was simply a balloon:

“In short, I did help to recover some debris near Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of July 1947. I thought at the time and think so now, that this debris was from a crashed balloon. My bottom line is that this whole incident was no big deal and it certainly did not involve anything extraterrestrial.”

A message from the Air Force to the FBI states:

“The Disc is hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a balloon by cable, which balloon was approximately 20 feet in diameter. Major Curtain further advised that the object found resembled a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out this belief.”

This is interesting because the material described is certainly not any extraterrestrial vehicle, but much like that of a balloon. Yet the message clearly says it wasn’t. In other words, the military admits that the wreckage was not a flying disk but also not a weather balloon… so what was it?

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Project Mogul: The Truth About Roswell

After researching the origin of the saucer craze, we can see that the archetypical UFO, the flying saucer, was merely the result of a newspaper misquote. We also know that after the initial debunking by Ramey, the Roswell incident faded away until the unreliable witness Marcel brought it back to life thirty years later.

This all leads us to the question: what exactly did Brazel find? Was it merely a weather balloon, or was it something else?

To understand what happened in Roswell, we also have to understand the era in America during the late 1940s into the 1950s. During the Cold War, nothing terrified the US more than the idea that the USSR could develop nuclear weapons that could be used against them.

In order to detect potential nuclear explosions from the Soviets, the US government created a top-secret program called Project Mogul. It was so top-secret — “Top Secret A-1” level of classification, the same as the Manhattan Project — that even Professor Charles Moore, a project engineer for Mogul from NYU, did not know the name until being interviewed about it in 1992.

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Mogul Devices

Mogul was created to detect atomic explosions from the upper atmosphere. According to Charles Moore:

“The idea was proposed in a letter in 1945 from Dr. Ewing to Glen Spattz that we might be able to detect nuclear blasts via pressure waves and low-frequency microphones. This was an idea developed from a study of the 1883 Krakatoa explosion where pressure waves circled the Earth seven times.”

A Mogul device consisted of neoprene balloons tied together, equipped with microphones to detect potential explosions and radar targets so the devices could be tracked while in flight. When in flight, a Mogul device could be 600 feet tall — taller than the Washington Monument.

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Mogul Explains Roswell

In 1994, the US Air Force explained away the Roswell incident as that of a Mogul device. Professor Charles Moore launched many devices from Alamogordo, New Mexico. He believed that the Roswell “UFO” was an unaccounted-for Mogul device, Flight Number Four, which was the closest unaccounted-for device to Brazel finding the material on June 14th. Flight 4 was launched on June 4th.

In several interviews, Moore gives compelling reasons for believing this. Regarding the strange hieroglyphs:

“I have a specific recollection of reinforcing tape applied to the seams of the reflectors that had some symbols such as arcs, flowers, circles, and diamonds. These were pinkish in color.”

The radar targets had the same strange markings on them, according to Moore, who said they were put on the targets by the toy company that manufactured them. The targets had balsa wood frames similar to the sticks or balsa wood material other witnesses attested to.

The frames were coated in glue, making them tougher — probably the reason Marcel thought they were not in fact balsa wood. The glue would make the pieces “somewhat burn resistant,” which could account for the stories of the material not being able to burn. The material straightening itself out could be due to a “paper laminate,” according to Moore.

Moore said that the reflectors being used were atypical for the area before he arrived, which could explain Marcel’s confusion. Brazel spoke of finding smoky gray pieces of rubber, which would be expected after a short period of exposure to sunlight. After an extended period of time, they would be blackened and charred, as can be seen from the photos in Ramey’s office.

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Conclusion

If one were to examine a Mogul reflector, it would seem very similar to the one pictured in Ramey’s office. It hardly seems an accident that Moore’s description of the components of the Mogul devices matches so closely with the testimony of the witnesses.

This seems to be the best explanation for the Roswell incident. While I personally would love to find evidence of government hiding aliens and their spaceships, we cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility of critical thinking. When we look at the evidence, it seems to answer the Roswell question. While I truly hope to find mystery in this world as Sherlock Holmes would say

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

References

• Korff, Kal K. What They Don’t Want You to Know: The Roswell UFO Story. [Publisher info if known]
• Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Roswell UFO Incident Documents.” FBI Vault. https://vault.fbi.gov/roswell-ufo-incident
• Wikipedia contributors. “Roswell UFO Incident.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident

Note: Additional sources were referenced during initial research but are currently unlisted due to migration from prior archives.