From: [email protected] [John Stepkowski]
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 08:30:53 +1000 (EST)
Fwd Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 00:58:50 -0400
Subject: Re: Roswell: Historical Facts
Hi Vince;
Regarding;
> From: [email protected]
> Date: Fri, 09 May 97 14:06:47 cst
> To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <[email protected]>
> Subject: Roswell: Historical Facts
> We can argue the merits of particular Roswell witnesses, but there
> is one inescapable historical fact that can't be denied. The
> commander of the Roswell Army Air Field officially announced that
> the U.S. Army Air Force had recovered a "flying disk."
There is a lot of doubt about this.
Walter Haut, who according to Randle/Schmitt et al. wrote this
release, has stated many times that Col. Blanchard told him to issue
it. In an article for the August/September 1992 issue of _Air &
Space/Smithsonian_ magazine, Frank Kuznik wrote:
Before my trip to Wright-Patterson, I tracked down Walter
Haut, the retired base public information officer who wrote the
infamous press release, and asked him if he ever actually saw the
wreckage. "No, and I feel like an idiot every time somebody asks
me that," he said ruefully. "I got a call from the base
commander, who basically dictated what was in the press release."
And yet the "flying disk" release states that: "The _Intelligence_
office of the 509th Bombardment group ... announced that the field
had come into possession of a flying saucer. According to information
released by the department _over the authority of Maj. J.A. Marcel,
intelligence officer_, the disk was recovered.... The _intelligence
office_ stated that no details...etc.."
In the _OMNI_ article, "The Truth About Roswell", a copy of which can
be found at: http://www.omnimag.com/o07jul/ros_truth.html, Dava Sobel
questioned Walter Haut about this point and more confusion arises:
"When Blanchard talked to you about what to say, did he use the
words 'flying saucer?"' I asked. "Did he seem to be frightened?"
[...]
"I do not remember the minute details," Haut told me. "I feel that
I've had a pretty full life, and how the colonel passed that
information on to me I cannot honestly tell you. I don't know
whether he called me on the phone and said, `Haut, I want you to
put out a press release and hand deliver it to the local news
media. Here's what I want in it.'
"Or," Haut continued, "the adjutant might have called and said,
`Haut, the old man's got a press release he wants you to pick up
and take it around town."'
When I pressed Haut about the authorship of the release, he
answered frankly: "I cannot honestly remember whether I wrote it,
whether he had given me the information and told me `This is what I
want in it.' It was not that big a production at that time, in my
mind."
I couldn't believe that. Wouldn't a flying saucer have been a
pretty spectacular find?
"Well, there were quite a few reports of flying saucers at that
time," Haut reminded me. "I had a multitude of hats I wore. I had
all kinds of things to do. I asked my wife, when all this [the
renewed interest in Roswell in the mid 1980s] started, `Do you
remember me coming home and saying anything about it?"'
Her reply, he recalled, was simply no.
If Haut was ordered to announce this astonishing discovery to the
world by Col. Blanchard, why do all roads lead to Maj. J. A. Marcel
of the Intelligence office? And just who decided to describe the
debris as coming from a "flying disk" when Marcel never saw anything
remotely disk-shaped?
Contrary to established Roswell lore, Haut did not know how the
release came to be written. If anyone has any ideas about this
I'd appreciate hearing them.
> Two points should be considered about this historic fact:
> 1. Using a sensational "RAAF captures flying disk" press release
> as a cover story for some other incident would attract more
> attention to the incident than for the AAF to simply say nothing
> at all.
Which is precisely what happened. Phones into Roswell and the Air
Corps in Washington were deluged with callers from all over the world.
It's difficult to comprehend the "flying saucer" Zeitgeist now, but
after the Arnold sighting on June 24th, there wasn't a day when
"flying disk/disc" stories weren't making front page news. What
hasn't been explored, however, is that nobody knew what a "flying
disc" or "saucer" was.
Newspapers of the time used "flying saucers" as a generic term for all
unidentified object reports. Jan Aldrich first pointed this out some
time ago, and reading newspaper accounts from the 1947 wave verifies
this. Whether the reports were of flaming objects, objects with wings
glistening in the sun, discs, "snowballs", cigar shapes, or even
high-altitude contrails, inevitably the newspapers headlined them as
the latest "saucer" or "disc" sightings. Few reporters bothered to
contemplate the wider implications of unknown objects flitting about
the sky. The exciting "Men from Mars" angle was played up by some
newspapers, but the majority view was that the reports themselves were
sufficiently newsworthy not to need any in-depth analysis. Reporters
speculated that "saucers" were weather balloons, secret military
projects, "sky phantoms", "floaters" in the eyes of the witnesses and,
not surprisingly, that people were most likely to see "saucers" when
they were "in their cups."
If someone told you in 1947 that they'd recovered a "flying disk",
hardly anyone - if anyone at all - would've immediately assumed you'd
found a "space ship". But based on all the newspaper reports, boy,
would they have been interested!
Nobody in their right mind would have used a "flying disk" cover
story during the Arnold wave of 1947 and not expect to get swamped
by reporters.
> 2. If the "flying disk" press release was an act of collosal
> stupidity based on simple misidentification of any kind of
> balloon wreckage, Col. Blanchard's distinguished career would
> have effectively been over from that point on.
A few points here.
Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that what Marcel found
really was part of "Project Mogul/Whatever". RAAF wouldn't have
known anything about it - TOP SECRET project, special decoder ring,
show me the secret handshake and all that - so that gets everybody off
the hook.
Let's also remember that at this stage nobody was talking about
interplanetary space ships. "Flying saucers" were being explained as
everything from balloons to who-knows-what. If Marcel had come into
Blanchard's office and said he'd found a "flying disc", no doubt
Blanchard would have been pleased that at last the USAAF would be able
to discover the true nature of these things. But, and this is a big
BUT, if Marcel had said - "Look at this stuff, it's incredible! You
can't break it, bend it, cut it or burn it. And look at these weird
markings. What the hell are they?" - would Blanchard have approved
the "flying disc" announcement to be released?
If Blanchard had handled the debris and confirmed these extraordinary
properties, wouldn't he have phoned "higher headquarters" and awaited
instructions first? You didn't get to be the commander of the world's
only atomic-ready Air Base if you weren't a team player who followed
orders. If Blanchard knew the debris Marcel recovered had incredible,
almost unearthly properties, would he have permitted that news to be
released without first consulting Washington? And if one of the
USAAF's finest had called Washington and told Gen. Ramey or Gen.
Vandenberg: "This stuff is the most amazing thing I've ever seen!"
what would've been the response? "Cool! Send it to us by first
available carrier. Oh, and you may as well tell the world. Get your
PIO to send out a press release about it. You don't know what the
stuff is? Oh, call it, um, a 'flying disk.'"
How likely does that sound?
> We know that Blanchard suffered no negative career repercussion
> as a result of the Roswell press release.
Which wouldn't have been the case if he'd been a maverick who'd
decided to "spill the beans" to the world against the orders of his
superiors. Or if he'd been the victim of someone else's
carelessness.
Whatever happened, a release seems to have been officially
sanctioned. The mystery remains over who wrote the release and why
they used the words they did. Concluding that a trunk full of
bits and pieces were part of a "flying disk" sounds like someone
desperately wanted that material to be from a "flying disk."
As fast as the tumult over the Roswell "disk" arose, it subsided
just as quickly. Reading the newspaper reports of the time
highlights this fact. _Big News_ July 8 and 9 (the other papers
were a day behind the _Roswell Daily Record_), and nothing about
Roswell after the "it was just a balloon" explanation. In fact,
the Roswell disk story crashed to earth rapidly after the
Haut/Blanchard/Marcel/Some Guy press release hit the newswire.
Here's a brief excerpt from Loren Gross's excellent _UFOs: A History
Volume 1: 1947_ detailing just how quickly the press release was
"deflated":
[...]
Bedlam.
Washington was caught flat-footed. So many reporters jammed
the Pentagon press room one would think money was being given
away. Lt. General Hoyt Vandenberg, Vice Chief of Staff, Army Air
Corps, dashed to the press room to take charge personally and
bring some order out of the chaos. Fending off the pad and pencil
boys, General Vandenberg got Fort Worth, Texas, Eighth Air Force
Headquarters on the phone and conferred with the officer in
charge, Brig. General Roger Ramey. Nearly every major American
newspaper, plus some foreign ones, tied up the phone lines to the
Roswell Sheriff Office of George Wilcox. The San Francisco
_Examiner_, however, correctly surmised that the Commanding
Officer of the Eighth Air Force was its best bet and got through
just ahead of its competitors
After Vandenberg hung up, General Ramey made himself
available to the press. The San Francisco _Examiner_, a Hearst
paper, was the first to get through to the General. The
_Examiner_ found General Ramey in a seemingly jocular mood whose
first words when picking up the receiver were: "Everybody in the
country is trying to get through on this telephone." His
statement on the saucer matter was less sensational than those
coming from Roswell. The fragments, General Ramey said, were
"flimsy," of a foil construction of some sort. The General had
the word of Warrant Officer Irving Newton, the Fort Worth Air
Base forecaster, that the thing as only a beat up weather balloon
radar reflector. The Fort Worth commander expressed his
consolations that he had to disappoint the news media by
stripping the saucer find of its glamor.
The tumult had lasted an hour.
After the capture story had swelled and then burst like a
bubble, military officers at Roswell Field received, according to
sources known to United Press, a "blistering rebuke" from Air
Corps Headquarters in Washington for their part in the panic.
Consider the aftermath of the "panic". The day after the excitement
had subsided, there was Gen. Ramey in his office, looking through
the newspapers in which his picture featured so prominently. Nice
pictures. No doubt Mom would've been proud. The phone was no longer
jangling off the hook with calls from reporters, and Haut et al. had
been suitably dressed down. The aggregate damage to the soon-to-be
USAF? Minimal. Had it happened today, Letterman and Leno would have
feasted off the incident for months, but by July 10, 1947, Roswell was
just a small town in New Mexico with an A-Bomb base again.
And Major Marcel seemed to agree with that. No stories from him of
large numbers of C-54s descending on the base with all manner of
experts, no sudden influx of unknown personnel, no heightened state of
alert at the base, no major road trains driving out into the desert
and, most importantly, no stories about recovered flying saucers -
complete ones this time - and ET bodies being stored in aircraft
hangars. As far as Major Marcel was concerned, his "saucer" was a lot
of sticks/beams and bits of foil-like material that were spirited
away, never to be seen again. And he wasn't even ordered not to talk
about this "unearthly debris," either.
> A third point concerns the shipment of Roswell debris to
> Wright-Patterson. While this has not been proved beyond a doubt
> like the press release and Blanchard's subsequently successful
> career in the AF,
Can you clarify this, please? No one is disputing that the press
release was written. The question is where does the release fit into
the "Big Picture" that has become the Roswell story/legend/myth?
I don't understand how documenting Blanchard's career has any bearing
on the "disk" story. Blanchard was a brilliant officer. When he died
of a heart-attack some years later, he'd risen to the rank of
three-star general.
> the evidence overwhelmingly supports the allegations that
> whatever debris was recovered was then air transported elsewhere.
The 'Mogul' debris was transported to Ft. Worth where Irving Newton
examined it. It was later flown to Wright Field where, according to
the USAF 'Mogul' report, it was confirmed as meteorological
equipment by a Colonel Duffy.
I can't say where the flying saucer and the ET bodies ended up,
though.
Thought-provoking post, Vince, thanks. Perhaps we can use this
opportunity to clear up the mystery of "Who Wrote The Roswell Press
Release?"
My guess: Major Marcel In the Study With The Typewriter... ;-)
Best,
John