Sifting the debris of Roswell
As a new series returns to the subject of the Roswell saucer crash, NIGEL WATSON talks to ex-CIA man turned saucer sleuth Ben Smith and asks whether it’s possible to discover anything new after so many years.
Roswell is the ufological equivalent of a black hole. It is so strong that no ufologist can escape its powerful embrace and its ability to distort our sense of space, time and reality.
Ben Smith, a former CIA operative and science fiction writer, in a new six-part TV series Roswell: The First Witness, is the latest explorer to plunge into this ufological maelstrom. What I wanted to know was whether he had uncovered any new evidence.
“Well, we have a journal written by Major Jesse Marcel (of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office) among his military documents and other prized possessions that he passed to his children. It clearly has an unusual sub-text or even encryption.”
As far as I’m aware, the journal quotes from Reader’s Digest and song titles, so I ask Ben what deeper meanings it might have.
“As an intelligence officer, Jesse could have been trying to hide information in plain sight, especially if there was a chance somebody could turn your house over and look through your stuff. Obviously, you would want to protect sensitive information that you wanted to remember. For most of the journal’s contents, like you said, it’s the Reader’s Digest, jokes, little idioms that are funny and kind of clever; but right at the period of Roswell you see a marked shift in handwriting style and content – the quotes are a little more serious. I would categorise it as a little bit more erratic. It shows some kind of stress and deliberate care in crafting the letters. Then a bit later on it turns back to the original handwriting style and stream of consciousness. So that three or four month period of strange handwriting is a huge flag for me that something interesting is going on here.”
Was this due to the stress of being unwittingly part of a Roswell cover-up when he was photographed with the weather balloon wreckage at Fort Worth and made to look foolish?
“There is speculation there that I can’t make. I did my best to work with a handwriting authenticator and expert in forgery called Jennifer Naso. She could not tell
“We know there is a lot of debris that others claim to have retrieved”
me whether this reflected some mental state changes – she could only authenticate the handwriting itself. As an intelligence officer, I can personally see some kind of stress. Regarding the other evidence of the famous photos of Jesse Marcel and General Roger Ramey in his office at Fort Worth, we got some body language experts who were able to confirm some communication cues that I had missed: that here is a man under stress, who had been posed for a cover story. All that seemed to track with his claims of this being a government cover-up. His view was ‘I was a poster boy for something that I think is a lie.’ In the context of his journal, then, it does seem to suggest he was definitely under stress.”
Roswell is a complex case and it is difficult to identify any firm evidence to support the eyewitness testimonies and rumours. So had Ben found anything concrete at the actual site of the incident?
“I come at this question as an agnostic. I believe that it is possible that aliens do probably exist and may have come here, but I need hard evidence to get there. So our investigation focused on that evidence. At the debris field it’s windy, there are limestone sinkholes all over the place, and there is dust. We know there was a lot of debris that others claim to have retrieved. Our efforts were to see if we could track that down. We used the best technology and latest technology, to see if there was a crash here. Could we determine an
impact? Could we find any debris? And, can we also find any evidence of a government cover-up, like bulldozer tracks, a soldier’s camp, something to mark that there was a large-scale clean-up here of the kind some witnesses described.”
I ask him if he believes, as has sometimes been suggested, that there were actually two crash sites, the second containing more substantial wreckage and alien bodies.
“We did explore that in the third episode. We take into consideration other accounts describing a second impact site. I found that a bit harder to sink my teeth into. It also shifted efforts to validate Jesse Marcel’s story. I find his account, and the accounts by Mack Brazel, the rancher who originally found the debris, and Captain Sheridan Cavitt who accompanied Marcel to collect the debris, to be the most compelling: it is consistent and we have newspaper accounts about it. It was something we could directly address.”
So was it was a weather balloon? “I find Mack Brazel’s witness statements impeccable: he said it was not a weather balloon. He had seen weather balloons before. So that is pretty fascinating, but I was not able to find any of the debris that he did, the allegedly unbreakable metal and flameresistant material, or memory metal. But I found it compelling and I have not found any evidence to disprove it.”
I ask him if there was, perhaps, a cover-up to hide Project Mogul – the secret high-altitude balloon project designed to monitor Soviet atomic bomb testing or other secret activities – from the Soviets as much as from the American public?’
“Absolutely, and that is probably my first base-line assumption. This was probably some kind of atmospheric testing equipment or experimental aircraft, missile technology… or maybe a nuclear bomb fell off the back of a plane. In 1947 I think the US government is aware of Soviet espionage in this area, so it becomes a serious issue of national security.
“Was it a weather balloon or the Project Mogul listening device? Well, it’s a compelling argument, but there are flaws in it. We bring out experts in episodes two and three who are crash investigators to tease out details of these different competing theories. We did get hit hard by the pandemic, we did uncover some intriguing data to suggest there is still something out there, but the pandemic stopped us getting out there again and we did not have time to explore the site more deeply. But, I think there is something there to be found for sure.”
What does he think happened to the original debris?’
“If you believe in the 1995 report from the Air Force, and the witnesses at the time, it was boxed up and carted to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. From there it disappeared and was perhaps burned in a warehouse fire that occurred in the 1950s. That is totally plausible, as we did not at that time have agencies to look after or track this stuff. So it was possible that it got lost and buried.
“As for the other part of your question, if you want the story to go away or you want to hide the story from the Soviets, you don’t want to attract attention to it. So why the announcement of ‘We have a flying disc’? That’s a really bad cover story and is the opposite to what you needed to do. Was this a mistake by someone, like the base commander Colonel William Blanchard, whose transparency then got overruled by commanders in Washington?’
I suggest to Ben that we are looking at the case from our own historical perspective. There were a lot of things going on in that period: flying saucers had only just appeared in the headlines, and perhaps they got over excited by the possibility they had actually captured one. It was described as a ‘disc’ yet all the debris was of tin foil-like material. It is now hard to know what was going on in the minds of the people acting there. Did he get the chance to speak to witnesses and the people of Roswell about their thoughts on the matter?
“Yes, one of the best parts of the investigation was going to Roswell and the old town of Corona. We spoke to new witnesses who have never been interviewed before and they confirmed the details of Jesse Marcel’s story. But I do worry that UFOs have become such a big part of pop culture that it has overwritten people’s memories. Is this life imitating art or art imitating life?”
I ask what conclusions, if any, he draws from making the documentary.
“Regarding Jesse Marcel’s story, I believe he was telling the truth as he knew it. Our investigation was the most thorough forensically and there are indications there might be something there that could prove it was either a spacecraft or a balloon. I would love to go back there and find out more...”
NOTES
1 Counterintelligence officer Cavitt always stuck to the weather balloon explanation.
2 Ben notes that we have to accept there are discrepancies in the witness testimonies. Jesse never said the debris consisted of unbreakable metal, but that it was more like lightweight balsa wood, and he disputed his son’s claim that he saw purple I-beams. Mack Brazel’s daughter said she saw the debris, but later recanted her statement.
Roswell: The First Witness continues on Sky History on Tuesday 2 March at 9pm and is available on catch-up.
2 NIGEL WATSON is the author of Captured by Aliens? A History and Analysis of American Abduction Claims (McFarland, 2020) and UFOs of the First World War (History Press 2015).