The following is a short list of some of my father's awards and decorations.
15 awards for combat credit.
15 decorations and bronze service stars awarded for service.
Air Medal with oak leaf cluster for operational combat flight missions from December 4, 1943, to April 23, 1944. Attached to the 65th Bomb Squadron.
Soldier's Medal for meritorious achievement in military operations against the enemy in the Southwest Pacific Area from January 15, 1944 to November 1, 1944.
His post-war evaluations have come under major scrutiny, especially by the skeptics trying to undermine his reputation. He was thought of very highly by his superior officers both before and after the Roswell event. His marks are generally excellent with an overall rating of high excellence. He was marked down slightly for organizational abilities, but otherwise had excellent scores. One report from one individual had him as unimaginative, but I would think that would give him more credibility in describing the debris: If he was not imaginative, how could he have imagined debris from a weather balloon as having come from a flying saucer? David Rudialc has an excellent rundown of his evaluations on the Internet, at www.roswellproofcom-Major Marcel's Postwar Service Evaluations of May 6, 1948, to August 2, 1948, and General Ramey's evaluation of August 19, 1948.
D Vice Admiral Blandy of Operation Crossroads wrote an endorsement highly recommending Marcel for the permanent award of the Army Commendation Ribbon.
In spite of what the skeptics of my dad say, the Roswell event did not affect his career, as he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the reserves.
Chapter 2
The Debris
The year 1947 began in a burst of optimism. Although the United States had just fought one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of humankind, we were still relatively innocent in many ways. Life was settling back to normal after the war, and the country was moving forward with a newly robust economy. Our lives were enhanced by modern conveniences that had only been dreamed of a few years earlier. We were in total control of our destiny, and the sky was the limit where our standard of living was concerned. Those were good times in my life, simple times when little boys could play and dream and aspire to greatness, seemingly limited only by their imaginations. Little did I know, however, that things were about to change beyond anything I could possibly have imagined, and that the world I knew would never again be as simple.
I turned 11 that year, and similar to a lot of kids my age, I was interested in aviation. The dashing aces who had torn up the skies during the two World Wars were my heroes, and stick-built models of the airplanes they had flown hung from the ceiling of my bedroom at various attitudes. My favorite models were the WWI biplanes such as the British SPAD, and the German Fokker triplane flown by Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the famous "Red Baron." (When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with the Bell X-1 on October 14 of that year, a model of his Bell X 1 joined the other models hanging from my ceiling.) And even though my dad wasn't one of the legendary aces, he did dream of becoming a pilot, and took his place pretty near the top of the list of my heroes. Although he never actually got his license, he did have a good amount of "bootleg" time in the right seat. I remember him telling us of a time when he was landing a B-25 Mitchell like those used on the Doolittle Tokyo raid, when he came in too low with a heavy load and almost collapsed the landing gear. No significant damage was done to the airplane or its cargo, but his pride took a bit of a beating. I remember him saying the aircraft was carrying a heavy safe and he almost landed underneath the runway.
Most days, I could be found riding around my neighborhood on my bicycle. But in those magical times, it wasn't a bicycle at all, but a Fokker, screaming across the skies over France, and I was the dashing Baron, striking fear in the hearts of my enemies and wonder in the eyes of my fellow aces. In my mind, I could hear the thunder of the engine as I swooped down on my prey, proud raptor in wood and fabric, the heat of the exhaust turning the oil spray to mist on the goggles I had purchased at the five-and-ten-cent store. I was, in those innocent times, the true lord of the skies.
In the cool of the evening, when darkness drove all aces to ground, we would chase the fireflies as they flitted across the blackness, or search for the strange insects and lizards that came out once the din of our aerial battles was silenced. So many years have passed since those days and nights. I am what most people would consider an old man now, but when I close my eyes, I am still a little boy, drinking deep from the well of wonder that seems to run dry as we get older. I may tend to forget little things that happened to me yesterday or the day before, but I can still remember the sounds, the smells, and the sky that burned brighter and clearer in daylight than any I've seen since, and that by night held a darkness that must only exist in this inexplicable place, and on planets beyond the reach of grownups and their machines.
But something was happening in our skies that summer that shattered the simplicity of the times and defied explanation. How much was real and how much was the product of the public's overly active imagination is something on which no one can agree, even today. In June, there had been dozens of reports of strange objects flitting through the air, which most observers described as flying saucers or flying discs. For instance, Kenneth Arnold was a civilian pilot who was flying around Mt. Rainier that month, looking for a downed aircraft, when a reflection of sunlight caught his attention. As he looked in the direction of Mt. Baker, he saw nine boomerang- or crescent-shaped objects flying in formation near the mountaintop, apparently traveling at a tremendous speed. He likened them to saucers skipping over the surface of water, but when he tried to close in on them they were traveling much too fast. That was one week before something crashed to the ground outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Not long after that there was a report of an unknown object being picked up on radarscopes at Alamogordo and White Sands. The next day there were various eyewitness reports of a glowing object traveling in the area of Roswell heading toward the northwest.
About that time I recall seeing an intense blue-white light traveling to the northwest over Roswell one evening as I looked up while going into the house. I did not put much meaning into that sighting, so accustomed was I to the magic of being a boy growing up in the desert, until I learned of other people reporting basically the same thing. I began to wonder if there might be lords of other skies unknown to us, who had come to pay a visit to the men who reigned supreme beneath this sun.
The event that was to change my father's life-and muie-happened one stormy summer evening at the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, about 75 miles north of Roswell. The foreman of that ranch, William "Mac" Brazel, heard a sound like some sort of explosion. The sound was apparently heard on another ranch some 10 to 12 miles away. Mr. Brazel reported that the noise was strong enough to rattle the windows in the ranch house for a short time. The thunderstorms in the area that night were pretty severe, and goodness knows the summertime storms around Roswell were frequently intense, with high wind and copious amounts of rain. The storms usually came on very quickly, and the skies would clear just as suddenly. I recall one afternoon I went to a movie at the Plains Theater with a friend when a cloudburst just west of Roswell started up. By the time we got out of the movie, people were using boats to go down Main Street.