Is the truth really out there?
Former CIA operative Ben Smith investigated the crash which took place in Roswell in 1947 for a television documentary aired on the History Channel, or Sky History in the UK, called Roswell: The
First Witness. He spoke to the grandchildren of Major Jesse Marcel, the person sent to the crash site to gather debris for analysis. He also visited the site with aviation crash experts, studied a journal found among Marcel's possessions for clues and spoke to other witnesses. Was Marcel right? Was the evidence gathered that day really not of this Earth?
Before you began investigating, were you sceptical about what happened that day in 1947? I think my initial attitude was one of not scepticism, but healthy doubt. Being a member of government, having formerly worked for the CIA, I'd seen how information is compartmented. The priorities, from a national security standpoint, didn't really seem to align with aliens and the possibility of a huge, vast conspiracy. I've been involved with some pretty expensive operations and I had never heard about the need to cover something like this up. But maybe I was so low or unimportant that I didn't know everything that was going on at the CIA.
In the series you heard Marcel's version of events, not only through his family, but via tape and video recordings from past interviews. Do you believe what he was saying was true? Listening to the recordings, talking to body language experts, getting to know Marcel's family and seeing the fruits of his personality and his character manifested in his children and his grandchildren, I did believe his account in so much that he believed it, and I don't think he was lying. But I still found discrepancies.
We had Jesse saying that what he found was like balsa wood, but his son calling it an i-beam, so there are already witnesses with different accounts. And then you stack on properties of what was found, like ‘memory metal’ and ‘unbreakable’, and I could not find any direct evidence that these claims were from Jesse Marcel's mouth. That was always a tricky part. What came first: the idea of memory metal or the witness accounts?
How trustworthy are personal accounts?
Personal accounts are always tricky, even in the intelligence world, especially when you have individuals claiming they have access to superimportant information about enemy plans or a terrorist attack or what have you. You always have to take that with a grain of salt. You always have to investigate the person's motivations, their mental stability, because the last thing you want to do is sell fiction, or something not true, that could result in something terrible, like a war, based on false information. There’s a tricky aspect to this, and that's part of the challenge of dealing with something 70 years old. I really tried to do my best to cut through and focus on hard evidence and then weigh people's accounts with what we could find.
There was a lot of focus in the documentary on a journal found among Marcel's possessions. Why was it seen as a vital piece of evidence?
There are two factors: one, the words were written in an Army handbook around the same time of Roswell, and two, it was among the very few documents Marcel passed to his children. He handed over his military records, his medals and this journal to his son, and then later his grandchildren. I think as a primary document or a firsthand account, it's really the first potential evidence we have of what really happened at Roswell outside of some of the oral histories, and the question is why was this diary so important to him. Reading it, it seems to be a series of random musings, so we wanted to see if there was a code in there. As we saw in the series, codebreaking didn't work out. But there's still a possibility that the person who wrote it – and we found it wasn't Marcel himself – would remember, if they're still alive. I hope I get the chance to keep following up on it.
The government says the object that crashed was a high-altitude balloon used as part of a mission to spy on Russian atomic tests called Project Mogul. Did your investigation reach the same conclusion?
That was the confusing part. We took a safety aviation crash expert to the site, and he at first ruled out the idea of a Mogul balloon, said it was just impossible for it to have been a balloon. We had another witness scheduled who has pretty convincing research that suggested it definitely wasn't a balloon. I'm not convinced by the excuse.
Were there any people that you wanted to speak to as part of the investigation?
We had more witnesses lined up, but we kind of got hit with the pandemic and travel and health and safety issues, so we didn't get to do all that we wanted to. I would love to have interviewed some of the original researchers like Stan Friedman, who was one of the first to propose the theory that this was a government cover-up. I would have liked to ask the hard questions about who was the first person to say ‘memory metal’. Who used that? Where did it come from? I was able to get time with folks like researcher Don Schmidt, who interviewed a lot of the original witnesses, but even he couldn't give those kinds of answers.
So you'd like to continue the investigation?
Oh, absolutely. I don't think I'm done, and it's definitely made me more curious. I think there were a number of leads that we generated that I want to follow up on, and it’s still an open question in my mind. Until I feel like I have enough to form at least not a foolproof opinion, but something I could tell viewers that I think happened, then I won't be satisfied. My investigation so far hasn't convinced me either way, and I need hard evidence, but I think we got closer than others in looking for a conclusion.