Can we point to any examples in history? Of course. First, there was the breaking of many of the Japanese codes used during the Second World War. Those who knew this secret, and a vital, maybe the most important secret of the war in the Pacific, routinely lied to others to help keep that secret. I don’t believe anyone would fault them for that.
During the Cold War the FBI had a highly classified mission called Operation Solo. An American, because the Soviets believed him to be an important communist leader in the United States, was given access to the highest levels of the Soviet leadership. He was briefed and consulted by the most powerful men in the Soviet Union about many topics, and the man known as Solo reported it all to the FBI.
This was so highly classified that even presidents didn’t know about the operation. With the exception of Gerald Ford, presidents were not told where some of the most critical information they had originated (For those who want to know why Ford was told, it was because he was going to a critical meeting with his Soviet counterparts and seemed to lack confidence in the information he was given. To build up that confidence, Ford was told of the operation.) So, for Twining not to tell Schulgen everything he knew about flying saucers is not without precedence in both the civilian and military worlds.
The Air Force, apparently reacting to the probe launched by the GAO under pressure from New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff, made their own investigations of the Roswell case in the mid-1990s. This was ordered by the then Secretary of the Air Force, Sheila E. Widnall. They produced two reports, one suggesting that what fell in Roswell was a balloon array from the then top secret Project Mogul.
In the other they included an explanation for some of the stories of the bodies which relied on the experiments conducted over New Mexico using anthropomorphic dummies. These dummies, dropped from high altitude began falling in 1952, but none fell near Roswell before 1957. The Air Force explained that “time compression” accounted for the discrepancy between the believe something had happened in 1947 and the actual events some years later.
Witnesses for the Opposition
Of lesser importance than the documentation, are some of the witnesses found by UFO researchers, or who have come forward to tell what they knew, or didn’t know. Again, starting with the most important and working to the less important, we will be able to access their impact.
Former captain, Doctor (as in Ph.D) Lorenzo Kent Kimball, was the medical supply officer at Roswell in July 1947. He worked at the hospital, knew the doctors and nurses, and probably many of the enlisted men who worked there. He would have hung around with the pilots and other officers of the command and would have been in a position to know about any unusual activity at the base. He is emphatic in his opinion that nothing happened, that the story of the preliminary autopsy at Roswell is false, and that the whole idea of a flying saucer crash is without merit.
He wrote in an Internet article that he had talked to a number of pilots who were in Roswell in 1947 and all said that nothing happened. He found no one to corroborate the story and was, I suppose the right work is livid, about the suggestion that anything like a flying saucer crash had taken place in Roswell.
Of lesser importance is the interview with Bessie Brazel Schrieber who was the daughter of Mack and who said she was at the ranch in July 1947. She said that she helped her father, along with her brother Vernon, pick up the remnants of what she believes was a balloon. She said that they put everything into four burlap sacks and stored it under the porch. She said that her father didn’t return to Roswell and didn’t stay there over night. Her story is in conflict with not only her brother, Bill’s story, but is contradicted by the newspaper articles printed in July 1947. Those articles do mention that she, her mother and brother helped clean the field, they also contain an interview with her father conducted in Roswell at the very time she said he was at home.
Finally, and probably least important is the testimony of Walt Whitmore, Jr., the man called Reluctant by Karl Pflock. When he talked to Pflock, and to me, he told of getting directions to the debris from Mack Brazel who had stayed the night at his father’s house. Right here we have a conflict in the skeptical witnesses. Bessie Brazel said her father was not in Roswell overnight, yet, Whitmore said he was and saw him at his father’s, Whitmore’s house.
Whitmore said, that Mack Brazel told him of the wreck and gave him directions to the ranch and the Debris Field. Using those directions, he drove to the Debris Field, found it, and recovered several small pieces of debris. He told Pflock, and he told me, that what he had found were bits of balloon. For years he’d kept them in his safe deposit box, but then moved them to his house where they were stored in his “junk” room.
He was never able to produce it. He had plans to display it in Roswell and seemed unconcerned that he was on the record as saying that when he arrived at the Debris Field, it had already been cleared by the Army.
Documentation for the UFO Crash
What might be the best piece of documentation is the Ramey Memo. We have a provenance for it because we can see Ramey holding it in a picture that we know was taken on July 8, 1947. Anyone looking at a good quality blow up of the picture can see there is writing on the document and with only a magnifying glass, we can see some words.
If the interpretation of the memo is accurate, and that is a big if, then the debate must switch from the Mogul balloons to something much more astonishing. If the interpretation is accurate, then there were “victims” of the wreck, there is talk of the beginning of a cover up, and there is a suggestion this all is linked to the flying disks meaning the flying saucers. If it is accurate, then we can begin trying to learn who those victims were and what the disk was.
On the down side, is, of course, the problem with the interpretation of the memo. Clearly is it not universally held. Skeptics, and some pro-UFO researchers, have suggested that the interpretation is more in the eye of the investigator than on the document itself.
There are, of course, those first newspaper reports where it was declared that the Army had captured a flying saucer. The words were unequivocal. They had a flying saucer. These were the first of the articles and it will be argued, with some justification, that the later reports are the more accurate ones. Though the explanation does seem a little thin.
And to be fair, I must note that Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who was in Ramey’s office at the time did suggest that those later newspaper reports were part of a cover-up to “get the reporters off Ramey’s back.” That would suggest that the earlier reports more closely reflected history and the truth than those later reports.
More Eyewitness Testimony
The majority of the pro side of the case is made up of the eyewitnesses. Again, if their memories are accurateand they haven’t embellished what they saw and what they did, then the Roswell case is obviously extraterrestrial and now something of a more mundane nature.
We can start with Jesse Marcel, Sr. who said, repeatedly, that the object he found was something that came to Earth but it had not been made on Earth. He was trained in intelligence, knew the aircraft and the capabilities of most foreign nations, knew what was in the American inventory, and could recognize a balloon when he saw it. Had he misidentified a balloon in 1947, there was nothing to be gained by saying, in 1977, that it had been a flying saucer.