The Roswell Incident - the greatest mystery in UFO-logy?

I have read through the testimonies, the >USAF report and a GAO report.
On these grounds, not reading any other skeptical material on the subject, I have made up my own impression on what happened.
Of course, these are mere speculations, but so are, as I hope to show, the testimonies. It is only for the reader to decide who do you want to believe. In fact I would rather that you believed none of us, but made an thorough investigation yourself. I haven't done that, I have just read other peoples material.

A few words about Roswell

First, a few words about Roswell. Roswell is in New Mexico. The state is USA`s most secret, and has hosted many of USA`s most secret military projects.
Around Roswell is for example White Sands, where the V2-missiles flew around in the air. But they were blown away long before they could reach Roswell. Also to be found, is Alamogordo, where the first nuclear bomb was exploded, and then Los Alamos, where they were developed.
And there is a Air Force-base there, that were the first that had nuclear weapons.
Apart from that, Roswell appears to be a peaceful, little spot (I haven't been there...) in the desert in New Mexico.
The crash we are talking about happened closer to a place called Corona, but it seems there were more action in Roswell.

The most important people

What they say

 The greatest problem with this case is perhaps that the witnesses doesn't agree with each other (and themselves) what fell down that night.
First out is Jesse Marcel Sr. He says it was lot's of debris scattered over a large area. Huge, in fact, 3/4-miles times several hundred feet. But Marcel doesn't say anything about how the debris were distributed, something I would love to know. But Bill Rickett says that a Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, a physicist was called in to find the trajectory of the thing that crashed. The first thing I would do, is to get an impression of the densitydistributionfunction of the debris, but there is no telling of any such activity in the testimony. Strange, I think.
Then a press release is released were they say they have found a flying saucer.
Then the story is that the Air Force seals the area completely. After a couple of days, they find the main body of the UFO, 2-3 miles from the spot were the debris was. Another mile or so further, they find 3 or 4 aliens, one or more could be alive.
Everything is carefully picked up under heavy security. But there is none in the testimony I`ve read that did that, but there is two hundred witnesses interviewed on the matter.
The debris is flown to Wright Field. And somewhere is it denied that it was a flying saucer they had found.

Nothing happens, The Roswell incident isn't even mentioned in the Project Bluebook, a project were USAF looked into many UFO-cases. Then the Roswell case starts in 1977 or so, when the UFO-logist Stanton Friedman finds Jesse Marcel Sr. His testimony was recorded in 1979. Then many more comes.

Alien bodies...

Lets start with the most dramatic, most sensational. The claim that there were a crash site 3-4 kilometers (2-3 miles) from the large debris site, and even further away, there were a number of humanoid bodies from another planet.

Let's assume that there were bodies. Now, the individuals in the testimony disagrees whether there were 3 or 4. Barbara Dugger, who is the granddaughter of George Wilcox, the sheriff, who was contacted by Mac Brazel when he found the wreck, even claims one of them were alive when they found it. That isn't too bad, when the crash happened a week before they were found. The finding of the main body of the spacecraft was done by the military, and no civilians were allowed near. Not even the sheriff? Well, so they did really found the wreck of the main body and the aliens a week before. Why isn't that the story Mac told his daughter?
And the explosion prior to the crash was extremely violent. According to Major Marcel, the debris was scattered over a large area.
Strange if anything could survive that... And what did they do to it? Did they kill it before the F.B, the star witness, saw it? Or is it still living in the US under cover?
Though this Kaufmann, also said that: one were alive, but I haven't got much confidence in him. No....

Then this film comes out. Allegedly, it shows an autopsy of an alien. Most people believe it seems like the film is a hoax. The films need not be made to be a hoax. I'm sure there are lot's of ways things like this could have been made to document something. And there is nothing that connects it to Roswell, as I can see.
And now, some UFO-logists say the film isn't from Roswell, but from another crash at Socorro two weeks earlier. So what have we got? Still the problem with the inconsistencies on how many they were. This wouldn't have been significant if they weren't so sure about it. But the aliens appearance are quite consistently described as smaller than us, big heads and such. Only one witness has seen it himself, claiming there were four. Of course, Glenn Dennis had spoken to a nurse who had been there examining them. She said one of them were in good shape, and that there were three bodies.

I did some thinking about how the main body of the alien spacecraft got to the second site. And I talked to someone at the department of aviation medicine here. I found that isn't impossible that it happened the way they say, but it sure isn't very probable.
If the explosion were fairly symmetric, all pieces from the spacecraft would have the same speed relative to the center of the mass of the spacecraft that used to be. And the spacecraft were moving with a velocity in one direction itself. Now, if the main body of the spacecraft didn't have any kind of propulsion itself, it would not have come anywhere beyond any of the other pieces of the debris. It would have landed on the outskirts of the debris site.
So they ejected. Or rather the main body ejected from the rest of the spacecraft itself because they were warned that they spacecraft would explode.
Of course, the point with an ejection mechanism is to save the pilots lives. And therefore, they shouldn't have died if there were so, consistent with Barbara Duggers testimony.
But this ejection-mechanism of theirs had not a very clever design. If you see that you're about to drive into a wall, you wouldn't step on the gas and turn the turbo on, would you? You would brake as much as you could to make the impact less severe! Well, perhaps they didn't step on the gas, but they certainly didn't hit the brakes. If they did, they would have landed in the debris area, or close by.
The point with a ejection mechanism must be to take the pilot away from the exploding aircraft, and then reduce his speed to a minimum, and thirdly let him land as soft as possible on the ground.
The first action gives the pilot a little higher speed. There has been done experiments with mechanisms that would make the ejection upwards independent of the direction of the plane. There has not been any great successes, but it isn't far away in time. The braking. The air pressure does that bit, and that's some brake! And then to land softly, parachute.
It doesn't seem to me the ejection of our friends the aliens was designed that way. They traveled along at the speed they had at the moment the ship exploded, and fell to ground, quite sure of getting killed. That isn't the ejection-mechanism of an extremely advanced civilization!

I really planned to dismiss the finding of the alien bodies as just a good story evolving after (and maybe a little before) Marcel got out with his story. A result of small-town talk. I'm sure there are large numbers of such stories around. But then, this F.B.-person in and is not from this town. That makes it difficult. He is the one who says he saw four bodies. And he's the only one in the testimony who saw it himself. And just as the flash of his camera went off. The rest of the witnesses talking about aliens are second or third hand information. Like: "Dad told me stories about it when I was a kid", or "somebody told me" or "She told me about them to me", or something like that. Why is F.B. only mentioned by his initials? Of course, he was threatened like the others. I guess his an old man now. No job to loose. But they could hurt him if they knew his name.
There were not many photographers around. And surely, they are mentioned in the records. If somebody wanted to, they would easily find out who he was, and get to him anyway. I can see no reason for him to be anonymous. And he is the only one in the testimony I've read that is, and he is also the one who is destroying my picture.

Most of the witnesses doesn't say anything about it. I even read in some article that Major Marcel thought there were no bodies. But the testimony I've read does simply not mention it. Wouldn't it be a natural question to ask those who was connected? Or was it something that wouldn't fit in?

Allright, I'm on thin ice, but I'm not accepting this with the alien bodies at all. I feel I can do so as long as the evidence is so poor. They have to come up with better evidence than this.

Was it really a second crash site?

What do the witnesses say about the second crash site? Well, there is none of that witnesses that were there. Nobody has seen the second crash-site. Nobody has seen anything been taken away.
No wonder really. The area was completely and effeciently sealed by the military. There must a have been a large force out there to do the job.
There is one witness, Beverly Bean. When she was a little girl, her Dad used to tell her stories about men from outer space. He had been on a truck driving from the crashsite. This account is second hand. It's told to a little girl. We can't let this be too significant. Stories often get confused when you're small, you know.

And those who initiated this story, tells of no such thing as a second site. Not Major Marcel, not Mac Brazel.

In the light of the discussion I had on how the main body of the spacecraft must have gotten there, by an ejection that would be so strange to make that an intelligent civilization wouldn't do that. Definitivly not a civilization so advanced it is able to cross the vast distances between the stars. And in the light of no testimonies from the site, and absolutely no physical evidence:
No, I don't buy it!

Lots of weird debris.

That leaves us with the first debris site. I bet it was strange enough for those who found it, but the great question is: Is it something made on earth, or something completely different.
As I wrote before, two persons went out there to see what the rancher Mac Brazel had found: Jesse Marcel sr. and Sheridan Cavitt. They went through the debris together, and it is reasonable to assume that they talked about what they had found.
Sheridan Cavitt says he recoqnized it as some kind of balloon, Marcel says he understood it wasn't some kind of balloon. Wait a minute, Marcel says somewhere he didn't understand what it was until later. Wait a minute, Marcels son says his father came home in the middle of the night waking his mother and him, excited of what he had found, and wanted to show them. Wait a minute, he couldn't have been that excited about it, because he didn't care to go to the crash-site once more to take a closer look, because he had so much work to do at the office.
It is strange what the son testifies. If his father did understand this was something extraterrestrial, so that he wakes up child and wife, the discovery of the millenium, he would of course taken time to look at it again. No, I think Cavitt and Marcel discussed it on the crash-site, agreed that it was some kind of balloon. Marcel understood it wasn't as special as it look at the first glance, and didn't care to go there again. A photograph is taken were Genaral Ramey and Marcel is sitting holding the balloon. And this picture is printed in the newspapers with the denial that it was a flying saucer. It has been claimed that Marcel was forced to be on the picture and the UFO was swapped with a weather balloon. But why didn't Marcel tell anything about that, when he told so many other thing about this incident? No, when the UFOlogists came around in 1977 (or about then), memories of the first glance came to Marcels mind, and because he hadn't seen anything like it before, it became too tempting to make a story of it.
Something that also happened in General Rameys office, was the an officer by the name of Irving Newton came in. He got himself a good laugh according to himself: "Is this your UFO?" "Yes..." "But it is a weatherballoon!"
There is something strange about Major Marcels testimony. Now and then, there are tiny exaggerations made over short periods of time: First, he says explicity that he didn't see anybody try to make a dent in the debris, he just heard it.
But then he says: "We even tried making a dent in it with a 16-pound sledge hammer, still no dent in it."
In his testimony, he says that is wouldn't burn at all. On another occasions he has allegdly said: "It didn't burn very well". There isn't much difference here, but with a few changes like that, and you'll have an entirely different story over 40 years than what he really saw.
People saw unrecognizable symbols on the debris. If I was up to something secret, I wouldn't use recognizable symbols.

So where is this debris gone? The military picked everything up, and nothing is left.
I find it hard to believe that. According to William Brazel jr., the son of Mac Brazel who found the debris, he was riding there once a week after the crash, picking up small pieces. The debris site was, according to these witnesses, sealed off, and extremely effectivly, I must say, shortly after the crash was reported. If William Brazel jr. was able to pick up debris once a week after the crash, there must have been debris left after the military had been there and cleaned up. William Brazel handed his debris over to some captain that came by his house. If it was something strange about it, why wasn't he curious enough to keep just a tiny fragment? I would surely have been!
And if there was a large debris site, like Marcels testimony and this from Brazel jr. indicates, there should still be possible to find tiny fragments on the site. If it is practically impossible, I wouldn't know. I guess a desert is changing over 50 years, and the whole site may be covered with sand.
But there are more things in the testimony that indicates that debris may be around but not in the hands of the military:

  • John Kromschroeder was shown a piece of the debris in 1977 by Pappy Henderson.
  • Robert Smith claims he saw one of people there put debris in his pocket while loading the debris onto the planes.
  • And from the critcism of the AF report it seems that Marcel kept pieces of the debris.
    It should be a pretty easy task to trace this debris.

    There is no great abundance of original material from the time. But the pressrelease they issued saying they had recovered a flying saucer, may be authentic. An excerpt:

    "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the Intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.[...]
    Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters. "
    This doesn't fit very well with Marcels testimony. But it isn't to bad with Project Mogul.

    From this point, I think the analysis should be done by a folklorist, rather than a physics-student, but since I got this far, I guess I'll have to complete this document.

    Project Mogul - a secret balloon.

    Charles B. Moore constructed balloons that were to be used in detecting expected Soviet nuclear bombs-tests one in 1947 soon expected. They didn't have many options, and large balloons with among other things radar reflectors were chosen for the task.
    The largest balloon-trains were large: "Up to two dozen neoprene-balloons with a total length of up to 600 feet." Not all of the balloons were that large, and they were not large enough anyway to produce the amount of debris Marcel told about.
    This was the UFO-logists criticism against Moore: A few years ago they asked Moore if the Mogul-balloons could have been what Marcel told about. And Moore replied of course that it couldn't have been.
    But if you look upon Marcels statements not as the complete truths, but as a product of changes in Marcels mind over time, it seems as Marcel is describing a Mogul-balloon. And the describtion several witnesses gave of the debris, is pretty consistent with the radar reflector the AF says it was.

    Then, every flight in the Project Mogul was examined, especially those flights that they lost control over. One found out that flight #4 was the most probable candidate for the debris at Corona. Then the weather data from the time was examined, and they found that flight #4 would have gone that way. Of course, UFO-logists have criticized this report, and I have read some of this criticism.
    One thing thay say, is that this flight 4 the air force says it was, wasn't recorded. But other unsuccessful flights were. Flight 4 was a service flight, a flight to test a certain piece of equipment, that is, and that is why it wasn't recorded.

    From this point, I think the analysis should be done by a folklorist, rather than a physics-student, but since I got this far, I guess I'll have to complete this document.

    The dynamics of a good story

    One thing about the testimony is that everybody claims to remember things so very well. The UFO-logists criticize the air-force that their witnesses doesn't remember the events well. After 40-50 years I think that is perfectly natural. In fact, that the UFO-logists witnesses have such clear memories, makes them less credible, I think.

    In the analysis of the report internal inconsistencies, they are not at all looking at what the internal inconsistencies are, they are not at all looking at at the report standing alone, they are looking at it in the light of the other testimonies assuming they are the whole truth, or they are blaming the witnesses for not remembering correctly after all these years.

    Good stories have their own dynamic. You know how jokes evolve. We have all heard jokes in one form told by someone, and in a slightly different form by some other person. All testimonies must be regarded as interpretations of what one has seen or heard or maybe approximations to the truth. People might have seen the same things, but tell different stories.

    So, in general, I'm not accusing anybody of lying. There is no need to be lying to come up with a story like this. It's perfectly human.
    You see an event, you think it is kind of strange. You forget about it for some years. Then someone comes around wanting to hear what you have to say. Meanwhile the story has been lying in your head, growing. You think you have seen things that wasn't really like that. Big things become bigger, small things smaller. Strange things stranger. Things that wouldn't burn very well becomes fire-resistant. Just a few things like that, and you've got an incredible story.
    I may have to review what I said about lying when it comes to this Kaufmann. His testimony is not among those I have read, he shows up later, and I have only heard him in a TV-show. He claims to have found the wreck long before anybody else. And what he says is not consistent at all with Marcels testimony. He had a drawing of the wreck he claimed was original. It shows something that couldn't have been through the explotion Marcel told about.
    When asked if he is sure about this, he doesn't only say he is 100% sure about it, but 1000 % sure. Somebody who is 100 % sure about something that happened 50 years ago is certainly exaggerating. Somebody who is 1000 % is lying! And then, I hear he has changed his testimony 5 times already, that's 5000 % sure...

    In the testimony, the only piece that was presumeably recorded just after the incident describes something that well could be a weather-balloon. And it was a large balloon. The rest of it has change due to the dynamics of a good story.
    Another describtion of what it was appears in App II of the GAO-report. This is an FBI-document from the time, describing what it was, and what was done to stop the story.

    Summary

    Final Remarks

     The testimonies I've read has been biased as they were recorded. To have an unbiased testimony, one should record the questions as they were asked, and the answers as they were told, letter by letter. Otherwise, the investigator would interpret his findings as they are recorded in the light of his existing image, which is not good science.

    They say in the testimony that Sheridan Cavitt claims he never was at the crash site. Cavitt says himself that he has spoken to UFO investigators several times, but he got tired of getting misqouted all the time. It seems to me that the UFO investigators has omitted Cavitts testimony because it didn't fit in.

    Most of the witnesses say nothing about alien bodies or a second crash site. There should be a natural question to ask the rest of the witnesses, like Jesse Marcel sr. Perhaps the question was asked, but the answer has been omitted in order not to destroy the myth.

    Because that is what it is. Not a doubt in my mind. A modern fairy tale. Appearently there are large economic interests in this particular case, but some UFOlogists that are not in it for the money, has said that this event is not a mystery.
    I started looking at this case because I heard on TV that this was the greatest mystery in UFOlogy. If it is, well the UFO thing isn't much of a mystery.

    References on WWW.

    kjetikj@fys.uio.no
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