Much has been made of the fact that the original discoverer of the device, rancher W. W. Brazel, was quoted by the Associated Press as being "sorry he told about it" and describing what he found as tinfoil and other debris. There are three enormous problems with the credibility of the rancher's statements. The first is that he was held incommunicado for days before he made them. The second is that members of his family have asserted that he made them under duress, and his being held incommunicado, which is a matter of record, would certainly support that assertion. The third problem is more telling because it does not rely on the rancher's verisimilitude at all. It is that none of the officers originally involved ever thought that they were dealing with the remains of known objects or they never would have allowed their press release to be issued in the first place.
On looking back through old copies of the Skeptical Inquirer, I discovered an article in the April 1986 issue entitled "Crash of the Crashed Saucer Claim." As it refers to the same incident I have been discussing, I researched it in some detail. Its primary assertion, I am sorry to say, was not supportable at all. The article claimed that the whole busyness began with a story in a book by Frank Scully entitled Behind the Flying Saucers (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1950). I obtained a copy of this book and discovered that there is no relationship whatsoever between its rather dubious tales and the affair in Roswell in 1947. And I also obtained a photostat of the San Francisco Chronicle article from which I have quoted. The photostat is hated July 9, 1947, a year before the "events" covered in t e book. To connect the book and the earlier incident in any way strikes me as an example of poor scholarship and seems not to be supportable. In addition, the Skeptical Inquirer article makes much of rancher Brazel's statements, as quoted by the Associated Press, but does not acknowledge in any way that he made them after a period of being held against his will, and in the presence of the An-Force officers who had been interrogating him. If all he found was a crashed weather balloon, why did they interrogate him? A more logical course would have been to interrogate and severely discipline the officers responsible for the "false" press release. There was no reason to hold an innocent citizen who had made an innocent mistake. Strangely, based on the service information I was able to obtain from the Air Force, I found no evidence of disciplinary action taken against any of the officers involved in the press release.
Was Mr. Brazel interrogated in order to induce him to change his story? There seems to be no other logical conclusion. The inescapable fact of the Roswell affair is that a group of professionally competent Air Force officers caused the publication of a press release claiming that the Air Force had recovered a crashed fling disk, after observing the debris. Only after this' release was published was any ahem pt made to change the story. Even then, neither the release nor the professional competence of its author, his base commander, or the concerned intelligence officers was ever called. into question, publicly or-as far as I was able to discernin internal Air Force procedures. Instead the original witness, who was in no position to know what he had actually seen, was placed under duress and compelled to change his story. Even this process took a substantial period of time, which suggests that the man may have been clinging to the truth despite the frightening situation he was in. The recent attempt to debunk this story in the Skeptical Inquirer was not satisfactory. As a matter of fact, its author, it turns out, takes the unusual position that all unidentified-flying-object sightings can be explained. I have not found many scientists willing to make such a strong assertion about these transitory and poorly understood phenomena, and I wonder if the Inquirer has not stepped beyond the limits of healthy skepticism in its recent article.
That there are deep secrets connected with the area of unidentified flying objects cannot really be denied. In the 1970s Senator Barry Goldwater was denied access to secret documents concerning apparent research into UFOs being conducted at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The National Security agency has gone all the way to the Supreme Court to protect some of its documents about the disks.
The book Clear Intent by Lawrence Fawcett arid Barry J. Greenwood contains legitimate documents obtained under the Freedom of. Information Act that make it essentially impossible to contend that government personnel have not, at the least, had some very strange experiences over the years. It is essential reading because of its coherence and its clarity.
Fawcett and Greenwood prove that some extraordinarily strange things have happened, and that the government has kept these things secret.
In 1966 a "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects" (the Condon Report) was undertaken at the University of Colorado. When it was issued in 1969. the Condon Report was instrumental in causing me to lose what small interest I had in flying disks and related phenomena. I read the preface, and saw that the project leader apparently thought that there was nothing of interest going on. From that I concluded that flying saucers weren't real and forgot about them.
Recently, I read the Condon Report more carefully and discovered that the internal conclusions are at variance with Condon's preface! His putting his thoughts at the front had the effect of hiding the actual realities of the report. It clearly states that a significant percentage of flying disk cases remain unexplained.
At the inception of the Condon Report, Robert Low, the business administrator of the University of Colorado at the time, wrote to his superiors the following memo: Our study would be conducted almost exclusively by non-believers who, although they couldn't possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally-objective study, but to the scientific community, would present a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.
At the outset of the project. Condon told a public meeting: "It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing to it. But I'm not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year." That is an unsound position to take at the inception of a study. Upon saying that, he should have resigned as project director.
Many of the scientists who participated in the study disagreed with London, especially after they saw the data. Some resigned in protest. One of them, Dr. David Saunders, published a book about it called UFOs? Yes! a few weeks before London announced his negative conclusion in November 1964.
The Condon Report ended the public interest of the United States government in the whole subject of unknown flying objects. Subsequent to the government's turning away from study in this area, very quietly the number of cases of people being taken by the visitors seems to have begun to rise.
Scientists nationwide have responded to the government's public position by refusing to take the matter seriously. Many people of the highest reputation have been sucked into this stance.
When the policy of denial was instituted, I doubt if anybody ever dreamed that the visitors would one day start marching into the homes of America in the middle of the night.
But it appears that this may be happening. If so, then the public has ended up on the Front line. And the visitors are not only entering our homes, they are entering our brains. And we do not know what they are doing to us.