Eventually Cavitt admitted that he had been at the base when Brazel went to the sheriff and Marcel went out to the debris field. Eventually he admitted he was the man who accompanied Marcel, though he was vague about the details of that thinking that he had gone only with Rickett. He thought Marcel might have been there, but he wasn’t sure.
Later, in 1994, when the Air Force investigated the Roswell crash, and Colonel Richard Weaver from the Secretary of the Air Force’s office visited Cavitt at his home in Sequim, Washington, Cavitt had a new story. Yes, he had gone out with Marcel and found a field filled with the torn up debris, but he had recognized it immediately. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a weather balloon and, of course, the rawin radar reflector.
Remember here that this was before Lieutenant Walter Haut had been called by the commanding officer of the base at Roswell, Blanchard, and told to create the press release. This was, according to the reconstructions of the time line and given the testimony of Marcel, Monday, July 7, a full day before the newspaper stories broke. No one had heard that something had fallen near Roswell other than the sheriff and, of course, Marcel and Cavitt. No one really knew where the debris field was or how to get to it.
But standing on that sun drenched field with the temperature in the high 90s, Cavitt didn’t say a word about the identity of the debris. Instead, he returned to the base and kept his mouth shut, never telling Blanchard what he had seen, and never telling anyone else that all the fuss was about a balloon. He would suggest, as a counter-intelligence agent, he was outside Blanchard’s chain of command, and while technically correct, it seems that Blanchard would have spoken to both Marcel and Cavitt upon their return from the ranch. Marcel would be enthusiastic about the strange metallic debris and stumped by its identity. Cavitt, however, told Weaver that he knew immediately that it was a balloon. So why didn’t he mention this to Marcel on the field, or to Blanchard when they reported what they had seen? Why allow anything to be misunderstood when he had the solution? The weather balloon is a rather mundane solution for all the excitement, but it would have stopped the press release and we wouldn’t be talking about it sixty years later.
Counter-Intelligence Agents Disagree
Instead, according to Lewis Rickett, interviewed by several investigators in the 1990s, Cavitt returned to the field later, along with Rickett. Rickett would say that they were stopped by the military police who were guarding the site because Cavitt and Rickett were in civilian clothes. Rickett would describe this cordon, mentioned that Major Edwin Easley, the provost marshal (think chief of police here) was there overseeing the security and said that he, Rickett, picked up a lightweight piece of metal that was slightly curved and about eighteen inches long. He first wanted to know if it was hot, meaning radioactive, and then he tried to bend it, but the material was so strong that he couldn’t do it. Very light weight and extremely strong would be the descriptions heard over and over.
Remember here that there are two important parts of that attempt. One is that the metal was light weight and thin. Rickett, as so many others, thought of it as feather light and maybe flimsy because of its light weight. And that he couldn’t bend it, no matter how hard he tried.
The second important piece of Rickett’s story is the military cordon. Military police were guarding access to the site and were requiring everyone to show identification before they were allowed closer. That included those in uniform and those who would be expected at such a location.
I will note here that others, such as George “Judd” Roberts, who owned part of local radio station KGFL in 1947 said that he, along with the other owner, Walt Whitmore, also ran into the military cordon and were turned back. Remember that William Woody talked of a heavy cordon along highway 285 with armed men. In the early 1990s, I talked with a vertebrate palaeontologist, Bertrand Schultz, University of Nebraska, who told me that he too, had seen the military cordon. Other witnesses said that they had seen military vehicles parked on dirt roads leading to the site, controlling the access into the desert. That there were military out there turning back traffic seems to be well documented by multiple witnesses.
Cavitt, however, during his interview with Weaver for the new Air Force investigation, would say that there weren’t any guards and that he wasn’t sure who he had accompanied out to the site. He thought it was Rickett and he wasn’t sure that Marcel had gone with him or not. He told Weaver, “There were no, as I understand, check points or anything like that (going though guards and that sort of garbage…”
So, we have a number of witnesses telling us contradictory stories. How do we decide who is telling us the truth? We simply take those stories told by the most witnesses and look at them. If one tells us something, and everyone else has a different version which is told in a similar way, then the single witness is probably inaccurate.
In the interviews I conducted with Cavitt, I only saw him nervous once. We were discussing the idea of alien bodies. He looked at me, leaned forward, picked up a magazine as if suddenly interested in it, tossed it down and leaned back. He asked, “Bill Rickett tell you that?”
Although it was Rickett, I didn’t want to identify the source of it. I said, “No,” and Cavitt relaxed. I now wish that I had said something like, “That’s not all he told us,” but I let Cavitt off the hook.
The important point here, however, was Cavitt’s reaction to the fact we had talked with Bill Rickett. It suggests that Rickett had the same sort of inside knowledge that we suspect Cavitt had. And, Cavitt was worried about Rickett providing us with some of that information. He just didn’t know what we might know from Rickett and what we might be guessing about. It also seems to underscore the veracity of what Rickett told us, like being stopped by a military cordon and suggesting that Cavitt’s comment about no military cordon is in error.
The Press Release
In Roswell, on July 8, after Blanchard had talked to Marcel and probably to Cavitt, Blanchard told Haut, the Public Information Officer, to alert the local media. Later Haut would not remember if Blanchard gave him the details of the crash for him to write the release, or had dictated the entire press release to him over the telephone. However it happened, Haut ended up with a short press release that said the many rumors about the flying saucers had ended when members of the 509th Bomb Group, there in Roswell, had recovered the wreckage of one. Haut, according to what he told me, took the press release into town, delivered it to both newspapers and radio stations, and then went home for lunch and to mow the lawn.
It was a simple and short press release, mentioning that a flying saucer had been captured. No real details available, other than a local rancher had told Sheriff Wilcox who in turn had told Jesse Marcel. Marcel was on his way to his higher headquarters with the wreckage. The article appeared in the Roswell Daily Record, then an afternoon newspaper.
Hours later Brigadier General Roger Ramey, photographed in front of some debris in his office at Eighth Air Force Headquarters, said that all the excitement was not warranted. All that had been found was a weather balloon with a rawin radar target. It was made of aluminum foil, balsa, twine and some fancy tape. The officers at Roswell had been caught up in the growing flying saucer hysteria. That is not exactly what I’d want to hear about the men who were members of the only nuclear strike force in the world. Instead, I wanted to hear about calm, cool professionals doing an important job, not hysterical men who couldn’t tell the difference between a rather common weather observation balloon and an alien spacecraft.