Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (51 page)

The next day, an army intelligence officer named Jesse Marcel went out to Brazel’s ranch to have a look. He was as baffled as everyone else. “I saw . . . small bits of metal,” he recalled to reporters years later, “but mostly we found some material that’s hard to describe.” Some of it “looked very much like parchment” and some of it consisted of square sticks as much as four feet long. Much was metallic.

The stuff was also surprisingly light—Brazel later estimated that all the scraps together didn’t weigh more than five pounds. Marcel and his assistant had no trouble loading all the debris into their cars and driving it back to the Roswell base. The next day, Marcel took it to another base, in Fort Worth, Texas, where it was examined further.

SUSPICIOUS FACTS

Was the Wreckage from Outer Space?

 •   Brazel and the Proctors examined some of the debris before surrendering it to the military. Although it seemed flimsy at first, it was extremely resilient. “We tried to burn it, but it wouldn’t ignite,” Loretta recalls. “We tried to cut it and scrape at it, but a knife wouldn’t touch it . . . It looked like wood or plastic, but back then we didn’t have plastic. Back then, we figured it doesn’t look like a weather balloon. I don’t think it was something from this Earth.”

THE MILITARY’S ABOUT-FACE

 •   The morning after the military took possession of the wreckage, the media relations officer at Roswell hand-delivered a news release to the two radio stations and newspapers in town. The release stated that the object found in Brazel’s field was a “flying disc,” which in the 1940s was synonymous with “flying saucer.” It was the first time in history that the U.S. military had ever made such a claim.

 •   A few hours later, though, the military changed its story: It issued a new press release claiming that the wreckage was that of a
weather balloon carrying a radar target, not a “flying disc.” But it was too late—the newspaper deadline had already passed. They ran the first news release on the front page, under the headline

AIR FORCE CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION

Other newspapers picked up the story and ran it as well; within 24 hours, news of the military’s “capture” spread around the globe.

 •   Interest in the story was so great that the next day, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, had to hold a press conference in Fort Worth in which he again stated that the recovered object was only a weather balloon and a radar target that was suspended from it. He even displayed the wreckage for reporters and allowed them to photograph it.

MR. BRAZEL’S UNUSUAL BEHAVIOR

 •   Mac Brazel refused to talk about the incident for the rest of his life, even with members of his immediate family, except to say that “whatever the wreckage was, it wasn’t any type of balloon.” Why the silence? His son Bill explains, “The Air Force asked him to take an oath that he wouldn’t tell anybody in detail about it. My dad was such a guy that he went to his grave and he never told anyone.”

 •   Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, authors of
UFO Crash at Roswell
, claim that shortly after Brazel made his famous discovery, “His neighbors noticed a change in his lifestyle . . . He suddenly seemed to have more money . . . When he returned, he drove a new pickup truck . . . he also had the money to buy a new house in Tularosa, New Mexico, and a meat locker in Las Cruces.” Randle and Schmitt believe the military may have paid Brazel for his silence.

TRUST ME

Today if the government announced it had captured a UFO—even if it was mistaken—and tried to change its story a few hours later by claiming it was really a weather balloon, nobody would buy it. But people were more trusting in the years just following World War II. Amazingly, the story died away. As Dava Sobel writes:

Even the
Roswell Daily Record
—which broke the story in the first place—was satisfied with the military’s explanation. A few days later, it ran a headline that was even bigger than the first one:

GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER

And that was the end of it . . . or was it?

DÉJÀ VU

The Roswell story would probably have stayed dead if Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist, hadn’t lost his job during the 1970s. UFOs were Friedman’s hobby . . . until he got laid off; then they became his career. “In the 1970s, when the bottom fell out of the nuclear physics business,” he explains, “I went full time as a lecturer.” His favorite topic: “Flying Saucers ARE Real,” a talk that he gave at more than 600 different college campuses and other venues around the country.

In his years on the lecture circuit, Friedman developed a nationwide reputation as a UFO expert, and people who’d seen UFOs began seeking him out. In 1978 he made contact with Jesse Marcel, the army intelligence officer (now retired) who’d retrieved the wreckage from Mac Brazel’s ranch 31 years earlier.

At Friedman’s urging, Marcel gave an interview to the
National Enquirer
. “I’d never seen anything like it,” Marcel told the supermarket tabloid, “I didn’t know what we were picking up. I still believe it was nothing that came from Earth. It came to Earth, but not from Earth.”

BACK IN THE HEADLINES

The
Enquirer
interview couldn’t have come at a more opportune time: It was 1979, and Steven Spielberg’s film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, which had premiered several months earlier, had stoked the public’s appetite for UFO stories. After lying dormant for more than 30 years, the Roswell story blew wide open all over again.

From there the story just kept growing. Dozens of new “witnesses” to the Roswell UFO began seeking out Friedman at his public
appearances to tell him their stories. Soon the Roswell “cover-up” included humanoid alien beings. “Over the years,” Joe Nickell writes in the
Skeptical Enquirer
, “numerous rumors, urban legends, and outright hoaxes have claimed that saucer wreckage and the remains of its humanoid occupants were stored at a secret facility—the (nonexistent) ‘Hangar 18’ at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. People swear that the small corpses were autopsied at that or another site.”

For the record, neither Mac Brazel nor Jesse Marcel ever claimed to have seen aliens among the wreckage. No one went public with those claims until more than 30 years after the fact.

WHY BELIEVE IN ROSWELL?

Why are UFO conspiracy theories so popular? Anthropologists who study the “Roswell Myth” point to two psychological factors that help it endure:

 •   It appeals to a cynical public that lived through the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, and other government crises, and who believe in the government’s proclivity for covering things up. As
Time
magazine reported on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident, “A state of mind develops which easily believes in cover-up. The fact that the military is known for ‘covert’ activities with foreign governments having to do with weapons which could wipe out humanity makes the idea of secret interactions with aliens seem possible. Once this state of mind is in place, anything which might prove the crash was terrestrial becomes a lie.”

 •   UFO theories project a sense of order onto the chaos of the universe . . . and they can even serve as an ego boost to true believers, because they suggest that we are interesting enough that aliens with vastly superior intelligence actually bother to visit us. Believing in aliens, the argument goes, is much more satisfying than believing that aliens are out there but would never want to visit us.

WAS THERE A CONSPIRACY?

So is our government hiding evidence of an alien crash-landing on earth?

In 1993 Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico asked the U.S. government’s General Accounting Office to look into whether the U.S. government had ever been involved in a space-alien cover-up, either in Roswell, New Mexico, or anyplace else. The GAO spent 18 months searching government archives dating back to the 1940s, including even the highly classified minutes of the National Security Council. Their research prompted the U.S. Air Force to launch its own investigation. It released its findings in September 1994; the GAO’s report followed in November 1995; then a second air force report was released in 1997.

PROJECT MOGUL

All three reports arrived at the same conclusion: what the conspiracy theorists believe were UFO crashes were actually top secret research programs run by the U.S. military during the cold war.

Take Roswell: According to the reports, the object that crashed on Mac Brazel’s farm was a balloon, but no ordinary weather balloon—it was part of Project Mogul, a defense program as top secret as the Manhattan Project itself. Unlike the Manhattan Project, however, Project Mogul wasn’t geared toward creating nuclear weapons; it was geared toward detecting them if the Soviets exploded them.

In the late 1940s the United States had neither spy satellites nor high-altitude spy planes that it could send over the Soviet Union to see if Stalin’s crash program to build nuclear weapons was succeeding. Instead, government scientists figured, “trains” of weather balloons fitted with special sensing equipment, if launched high enough into the atmosphere, might be able to detect the shock waves given off by nuclear explosions thousands of miles away.

UP, UP, AND AWAY

Project Mogul was just such a program, the reports explained, and the object that crashed on Mac Brazel’s field in 1947 was Flight R-4, a Mogul balloon train that had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field—near the Roswell Base—in June 1947. The train of 20 balloons was tracked to within 17 miles of Mac Brazel’s ranch; shortly afterwards, radar contact was lost and the balloons were never recovered . . . at least not by the folks at Alamogordo. The Roswell intelligence officers who recovered the wreckage didn’t have high
enough security clearance to know about Project Mogul, and thus they didn’t know to inform Alamogordo of the discovery.

On the whole the program was successful—Project Mogul apparently did detect the first Soviet nuclear blasts. Even so, the project was discontinued when scientists discovered that such blasts could also be detected on the ground, making the balloonborne sensors unnecessary. The project was discontinued in the early 1950s.

OTHER PROJECTS

The air force’s 1997 report suggested that a number of other military projects that took place in the 1940s and 1950s became part of the Roswell myth:

 •   In the 1950s the air force launched balloons as high as 19 miles into the atmosphere and dropped human dummies to test parachutes for pilots of the X-15 rocket plane and the U-2 spy plane. The dummies, the air force says, were sometimes mistaken for aliens . . . and because it didn’t want the real purpose of the tests to be revealed, it did not debunk the alien theories.

 •   Some balloons also dropped mock interplanetary probes, which looked like flying saucers.

 •   In one 1959 balloon crash, a serviceman crashed a test balloon 10 miles northwest of Roswell and suffered an injury that caused his head to swell considerably. The man, Captain Dan D. Fulgham, was transferred to Wright Patterson in Ohio for treatment. The incident, the air force says, helped inspire the notion that aliens have large heads and that aliens or alien corpses are being held at Wright Patterson for study.

NEVER SURRENDER

Do the GAO and air force reports satisfy people who previously believed the object was a UFO? Not a chance. “It’s a bunch of pap,” says Walter G. Haut, who worked at the Roswell base and after World War II distributed the famous “flying saucer” news release in 1947, and is now president of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. “All they’ve done is given us a different kind of balloon. Then it was weather, and now it’s Mogul. Basically, I don’t think anything has changed. Excuse my cynicism, but let’s quit playing games.”

B
ACKGROUND

John Elspeth Watkins was a Philadelphia newspaperman whose predictions were recently rediscovered by two Indiana professors. They call him the Seer of the Century and note that he was lucky enough to see many of his predictions come true before dying in the 1940s.

What’s amazing about these predictions? Remember what was going on in 1900: Production on primitive autos had just begun; they were still a novelty. People lived in squalor and ill health and died young. There was no such thing as an airplane. There was no radio; the first feature movie hadn’t been made; the telephone had been invented a scant 25 years earlier. It was a whole different world—yet somehow, Watkins described ours in detail.

“These prophecies,” he wrote in his introduction, “will seem strange, almost impossible.” It’s a fascinating measure of how things have changed to realize that our way of life seemed like science fiction to the average American of 1900.