Jesse Marcel
Major Jesse A. Marcel a staff intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group
Intelligence Office at the Army Air Force base at Roswell Field was the first
military man to observe the crash debris on the site of Mac Brazels ranch.
Marcel collected as much of the debris as he could and then drove back to Roswell
army base to show his superiors. It was Marcel who with the authorisation of Colonel
William Blanchard that released to the press the story that the USAF had captured a
flying disk.
This story was soon covered up by General Roger Ramey who informed the press that
all they had captured was a broken weather balloon. Marcel was forced to go through
with a press conference and say that he had made a mistake on the identification
of the debris.
Years later Marcel went one record to describe the actual debris that he had found,
and also the fact that he had shown his family the debris before he had reported it
to his superiors. He described the debris as follows.
"There was all kinds of stuff - small beams about three eighths or half inch square with some
sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. These looked something
like balsa wood, and were of about the same weight, except that they were not wood
at all. They were very hard, although flexible, and would not burn. There was a great
deal of unusual parchment-like substance which was brown in colour and extremely strong, and
a great number of small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn't tinfoil."
Marcel also claimed that he saw no bodies amongst the debris, however, it is now widely
accepted that the main part of the craft did not crash on the Brazel ranch.
Marcel proved a very strong witness due to his excellent military career. He has served
as a bombardier, waist-gunner and pilot, has logged 468 hours of combat fighting in B-24 aircraft
and was awarded five air medals for shooting down enemy aircraft in World War II. Towards
the end of the war he was attached to the 509th Bomb Wing, an elite military group for
which all those involved required high-security clearances.
After the Roswell incident he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and assigned
to a Special Weapons Program.