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March 19, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:19:20
Edition 245 - Jesse Marcel III

The grandson of the man at the centre of the Roswell case - on three generations of fightingfor truth...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, preparing as I am for the launch of the new radio show, Sunday Nights from 10pm on Talk Radio, here we are with the podcast edition.
Just to remind you, the radio show will focus more on the UK, will be a live show, and the podcast will be, as it's always been here, an international show.
It's been that for 10 years now, reaching every corner of the world.
So two different products, both presented by myself and directed by myself.
And we'll see how this goes as we try and do some new stuff with The Unexplained, as promised during this year of 2016.
I'm very, very excited.
And thank you for your support.
Please keep the donations coming to the podcast.
Otherwise, we won't be able to continue that.
And I want to.
Go to theunexplained.tv, the website designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
There you can follow the PayPal link and leave me a donation or send me a message about the show, a guest suggestion, whatever, the things that you've always done.
If you email me, please tell me where you are, who you are, and how you use the show, because I love to hear those stories.
Okay, shout-outs now.
Before Jesse Marcel III.
If you're listening to this show, you probably know what that name means.
He's the special guest on this edition, and his grandfather was the man in charge at Roswell, who many people say carried the can for it all all those years ago.
And Jesse Marcel III is carrying on his cause all these decades later and is a fascinating man in his own right with his own life, career and plans.
So Jesse Marcel III, special guest on this show.
Shout outs.
Heather Howie, great name, had a near-death experience, says, when I died, I sat up outside my body and there are no words in the English language to emphasize how peaceful, beautiful and wonderful that was.
Imagine peacefulness and multiply that by a thousand.
Great.
Thanks, Heather.
Nicole in Salt Lake City, thanks for your email.
Bob in Cary, North Carolina, thanks for your email.
Darren, an American citizen originally from Manchester in the UK, now in the Philippines, thanks for getting in touch.
Avid listener, Althea, tells me that she's always had a memory, and I'm trying to cut down a long email very short, just to say that she'd always dismissed this as a false memory, but it keeps recurring, and wonder what other people think about this.
We'll see.
The story is that Althea, as a child, lived in a house that had a flight of stairs, and the memory she has is of falling down those stairs, past a glass of water on the middle of the stairs, without disrupting the glass of water, and with seemingly out bothering her brother, who was at the bottom of the stairs.
He didn't appear to notice.
And this thing has stuck with Althea for all of these years and kept recurring.
Interesting stuff, Althea.
I wonder if that means something, either as a dream or an experience, or whether other people have had exactly the same as you.
We'll see.
Brandon Martin in Virginia, USA, some tips on tinnitus or ringing in the ears, which I've had now for three years, and a lot of people have, too.
Thank you for that, Brandon.
Tommy Sclutt, like the show about shadow people.
Thank you for that.
Sue Brooke in York, UK.
Stephen Spraggs.
David in Rochester, Kent, three of many people with congratulations on the new radio show.
Also, Peter in Southampton says the return to radio, Howard, is long overdue.
Thanks, Peter.
Jules, I promise to email the fiction story you sent, or rather read the fiction story that you sent when I get the chance.
Life is a little busy at the moment, but I promise I will make time for that.
And hi, Howard.
Great show as usual.
I've emailed before about the MP3 downloads cutting off prematurely.
Michael in Lancashire, I've checked this out, and so is Adam, my web guy.
And certainly when we try them on various browsers and various devices, they're okay.
So I wonder if the problem might be at your end.
Dawn in Derbyshire, love the show, Howard.
Many thanks for the effort you put in.
Thank you very much.
Cole, a policeman, has this story.
Living in Lancashire, the eastern part of the county in the 1980s, I was eight or nine when I was in a semi-rural area with my friend.
We both saw a figure, tall man, dressed in black, around 60 to 80 meters away from us, partway up a hill, in an elevated position.
We looked up for a few seconds and could see that it looked about six foot tall, plus had a black top hat on and all black clothing with a black cloak.
This thing proceeded to run towards us as if it was chasing us, and as it made its way in our direction, after a few seconds of watching it, I could see that it also had a white smudge for a face.
We got on our bikes and started pedaling frantically.
We were both terrified, and a feeling of real fear came over us.
As we pedaled about 50 meters in the direction of home, I looked around and didn't see it again.
I've never seen anything like this since, nor any other phenomena, although I'm very interested in the unexplained, especially ufology.
Thank you for that, Col. I wonder if anybody else had that experience, maybe in East Lancashire, when you were kids.
Eight or nine.
Let's see if anybody gets in touch.
New listener, Corey in Reno, Nevada.
Thank you for joining the club.
Gieser in Germany, nice to hear from you too.
Patrick in Melbourne wants a show on flight MH370, which, you know, there have been a lot of signs that they might have found wreckage of, but nothing really concrete yet.
What happened to that plane?
Tom, who last emailed five years ago, Tom, don't be a stranger.
Don't leave it five years next time, will you?
Marcy Vorges, fascinating email about shadow people.
Thank you.
Nice comments and suggestions from David Sandrowitz in the US.
Just a quick word here says, Darren, to say that I love your podcasts.
I work for Hull University as a groundsman, and I listen to the podcast in my tractor.
Says Darren, keep up the good work, thank you.
Philip Jackson in Kyoto, Japan.
Thank you for your email.
Connor Law from Denver, Colorado.
Love the show.
Listen to it on my way to school every week.
That's good to hear.
Margaret in Glasgow, looking forward to the radio show.
That same thought echoed by Ed in Cornwall, Sue Bourne in Traverse City, Missouri, Ed in Lowestoft, and Michael Cuozzo.
Michael's asked for some specific information about the new show.
Keep watching the website, and I'll do my best to pass that on.
Aki Majala in Sweden, a very, very thought-provoking email.
Aki, thank you for that.
A good guest suggestion from Nick in Carlisle, UK.
Thanks, Nick.
Charles R. Beauregard, now back in America, after living in Melbourne, Australia.
Charles, good to hear from you.
Carolyn, I passed your query on to Adam, my webmaster.
I think you might have an answer by now.
Mandy in Brisbane, Australia says, my introduction to the show, the bit where I talk about the need to move forward in life, this is the last show that I did where I said, you know, I'm doing different things now in life and you just got to keep moving forward.
You can't stay static.
Apparently that meant a lot to Mandy in Brisbane.
And I'm glad that it resonated with you because I do believe that.
You know, you can't.
And I've had periods in my life where bad things have happened and, you know, career stuff and all sorts of things which haven't been nice.
And you've just been like a rabbit in the headlights and not wanted to move and do anything.
And it takes a lot of effort to get up and move forward.
And that's what I'm doing.
And that is, I think, what I recommend.
Finally, Terry in McGull, Liverpool, listening to the podcast on my usual commute from Manchester back to Liverpool.
Is that on the A580, the East Lanks Road?
I used to go on that an awful lot back in the day.
If you want to get in touch and have a shout-out on the podcast version of the show, you can do that by going to the website theunexplained.tv.
And I'd be very pleased.
You follow the link there and get in touch.
A guest on this edition, the name Jesse Marcel.
You will know that Jesse Marcel, key player in everything that happened in Roswell.
He had a son who championed his father's cause.
And he had a son, Jesse Marcel III, who is a freelance writer, author, and film producer, born in Southern California, grew up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana.
He was indoctrinated, it says in his biography, into his grandfather's legacy, not only as namesake, but as protégé.
Jesse learned of an amazing tale where his grandfather was part of the discovery of a spacecraft that, in his words, was not made by human hands.
The biography also says that his current work is designing a flying car.
So let's not hang about now.
Let's get to the western part of the United States on Pacific Time and connect with Jesse Marcel III.
Jesse, a pleasure to have you on the Unexplained.
Thanks for coming on.
Well, thank you for the invitation.
I'm excited to be here.
No, look, you and I have something in common, and it's a peculiar thing, really, but we have a legacy name.
You know, Howard Hughes, I've had to live with that all of my life.
If I go to America, when I get to passport control, they say they call their friends around.
They say, I've got Howard Hughes here.
You, because of your descendancy, if that's the right word, you know, I'm not descended from Howard Hughes, but you are descended from Jesse Marcel, whose name, of course, is written not only into popular fiction, but written into history.
And everybody listening to this show, because my listeners are a kind of club, will know that name.
You have an awful lot to, I won't say live up to, but you have an awful lot to carry along with you.
Yeah, you know, it's actually some people, I've been asked a number of times, well, yeah, I'm kind of the protege, whatever, I carry the name for it.
But what's interesting about it is that people, it opens a lot of doors and it is not a negative thing.
For my father, Dr. Jesse Marcel, he was actually in an era where people were more, you know, they wanted to find, you know, they wanted to find some way to discredit him.
Well, he rode motorcycles.
Oh, that made him a bad guy.
He was a mountain climber.
Ooh, can't trust that guy.
But my age anyway, I actually have people, friends, friends of a couple of kids in school.
They're teachers, doctors, lawyers approaching me about, you know, your name's Jesse Marcel.
Do you have anything to do with that family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
And it's been a very positive experience.
In fact, I can't think of anybody that's actually tried to come forward and say, oh, boy, you know, so it's been a kind of an interesting experience.
And to be on the inside, look, I watched the movie about Roswell, which I guess was a pale reflection of the truth, but what came out of it was your grandfather suffered appallingly in the way that people often did in those days, supposedly for his country to protect whatever information may have been needed to be protected at that time.
That was the picture that we got.
It is a tremendous burden to carry, isn't it, down all of these years?
And your father, who I know that you lost your father two years ago, I lost my father two years ago as well.
I know how that feels.
I mean, your father fought for his father's credibility and reputation all through his life.
Yes, he did.
And as the story goes, he actually was part of the story back when he was 12 years old.
But he did.
In fact, one thing that was very interesting is that this little part of his life, which wasn't that small, of course, affected him his whole adult life.
He looked to the stars for answers for the rest of his life.
It really made a huge impact on him.
And in this genre, in this area, he really added legitimacy to this whole story, the idea of life that can traverse the universe, or a galaxy anyway.
And, you know, in fact, he was one of the more credible people I think that's ever been involved.
He certainly seemed to have a great deal of dignity about him, as did his father.
So it's a three-generation thing, and it is a very powerful story, which we're going to try and tell, but tell from the inside, because you are an insider.
You can't get any more inside this story than that, I don't think.
Let's talk about Jesse Marcel himself.
Now, I, at the beginning of this, called him the man in charge at Roswell.
Now, to some extent, he was in charge of that airbase, but in charge of the handling of the story, there was a commander above him to whom he reported.
So he was the man in the front line of this.
He was.
As the head of intelligence for the Roswell bombing group, he was, you know, anything that he was obviously involved in the nuclear bombing program.
That was actually the biggest part of his life at that base anyway.
But when this came up, when this strange material showed up, he was the man that had the education, basically the insight, if you can call it that, to look at this and try to make some kind of determination.
And so he was one of the first people out there to go out and look at this field of debris.
And his remarks were basically that this was not made by human hands.
He's never seen anything like it.
And obviously that's a very large statement to make, but it's really what started everything.
It was just that one little statement.
Now, the story goes, as reported in your father's obituary, as carried in one of the more credible newspapers here in the UK, it was in early July 47, a rancher called Mac Brazell found some odd-looking metallic debris littering a sheep pasture in a remote place in New Mexico.
On July the 6th, he took some of the debris to Roswell, the nearest big town, and presented it to the local sheriff who turned it over to officials at the Army Air Force Base.
That's where it began.
Yes, it is.
That's where he had his first, his commander, Mr. Blanchard, Colonel Blanchard, talked to him and said, you need to go out and take a look at this.
We don't know what it is.
One of the, you know, on a little bit of background, there were no aircraft crashes.
There's nothing that showed that we had lost an airplane that night or something entered our airspace at that point that would have, you know, as far as an aerial idea.
So, yeah, he was sent out there.
And if you can picture it, he went out there with those ideas.
There's something very strange is going on.
And I always kind of think about it this way is that, you know, he's in a car that's, you know, obviously we're talking back in 1947, you know, radio going.
He had a little notebook with him or a little journal with him.
And he's traveling out there.
And I, you know, was he experiencing fright?
Was it all excitement?
You know, exactly what was going through his mind.
But it turned out to be something that obviously changed the rest of his life and our lives.
So this is his descendants.
Excuse me.
Your grandfather, as far as your father would have reported to you, and you also knew your grandfather, of course, and spent time with him.
How did both of them talk about this, the discovery?
With great excitement.
You know, we always, you know, the big story, especially back in the late 70s and 80s, was more of the conspiracy.
Everybody was trying to discredit the idea that there was something out there, trying to discredit.
No, he didn't know what he was doing.
He was looking at a kite.
He was looking at this, whatever.
And that was kind of the view of a lot of the media on this site, anyway, the pond, as they say.
But the reality was we'd sit around and me and my father, brother and sister, would sit around watching Star Trek, the old 60s version.
And we'd sit there and talk about Roswell and how exciting it was.
And I always had this vision as a child thinking that I'm here having dinner with my family watching Star Trek.
And there's another child on another planet having dinner with their family.
And it was a very comfortable and a very positive thing.
It's actually, I'd say overall, you know, given some of the interactions of other people within our lives, it's been a very positive event.
And as a child watching Star Trek, this is sort of mid to late 60s, isn't it, when it was first on.
Yep.
How did you first become aware of the story of the enormous events at Roswell?
How did that filter into your consciousness as a small kid?
Well, what's interesting is, you know, it came through a show.
My brother, I have a younger brother, and he was listening to Paul Harvey radio show.
And they had mentioned something about Roswell, about something happened out there.
My brother talked to my father about it, and that's when we actually started talking about it as a family.
I would have been back, you know, around, I suppose, eight or nine years old, 78, something like that.
He would have been six, seven, somewhere in that age.
And that's how it kind of came out.
And it really became part of our, not daily speak, but we talked about it quite often.
But again, we as children would be looking for the sky to try to see if is there something up there?
Is there a UFO?
Are we going to see something?
Is there, you know, just it was a very positive experience.
Then we spent summers in Louisiana, where my grandfather lived, out of Homo, Louisiana.
And then, you know, he got involved.
Of course, he had a chance to tell his grandkids all about this story.
He was always reserved.
He was a happy guy at that age.
He would have been in his late 70s, early 80s.
And he would talk about Roswell with a little glean in his eye, a little smile on his face.
He'd always say, give us the story.
And there's so much more that I just can't tell you guys.
And he's sorry for that.
He actually said that.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Quite a number of times, actually, to us kids as we grew up.
Very important.
We're very impressionable when we're kids.
When he used to say that to you, what was the look on his face?
A grin.
He was actually, you know, not childlike, but just like, you guys don't realize what all happened out there kind of thing.
Just what a huge event it really was.
Boy.
And it must have been difficult for him to even allude to, because look, I can't believe there's nobody in this world, there's anybody in this world who knows nothing about the story of Roswell and how something, it is said, crashed in the desert, possibly with aliens in it, very strange metal with hieroglyphics on it, and some of that metal found its way back into your grandfather's home and your father played with this metal.
The story goes.
And it's important that we kind of state that.
It's been in the movie.
At least that part of it was accurate.
But these were enormous, enormous events.
And unfortunately, your grandfather paid a tremendous price because the story of something landing there and it possibly being extraterrestrial in origin got first of all into a local newspaper, I believe, then on a local radio station.
And then, of course, the suits came down and closed the whole thing down and said, no, weather balloon.
This is perfectly innocuous.
And effectively, essentially, the people who've been telling you this story about it being something from outer space potentially are incorrect in what they've told you.
And your grandfather, assuming that that wasn't the truth, had to go along with it.
Yeah, he was right dead center.
You know, if you've seen that kind of a famous picture of him standing over a piece of debris and holding a piece of debris in his hands, And it was an interesting situation.
He had thought that he was being brought into a room where they were actually going to start talking about this as being a reality, that this is truly something from outer space, that this is truly something of non-human origin.
He walked in this room, he was basically barked a bunch of orders.
In that room, was what was called a Rawin target, a very simple device made out of something as simple as tinfoil, actually, and kite sticks, and said, this is what you saw.
And it's interesting if your viewers, if you, or listeners, if you take a look at that picture, you'll see him not even looking at the camera.
You see him looking off at the summit that's basically barking at him to make sure he falls in line and does what he's supposed to do for his country.
And that is that this is what you saw, period.
But he had to sacrifice his reputation to an extent in front of the American population, the American masses, in the cause of national security.
The story goes.
And that's what it is.
He was head of intelligence.
That was his job.
He was supposed to fall in line, do what he was told, and then if not, go along with the story and maybe even push the story.
He went back home, back to the house with his wife, VO, and my father, and said, what you saw last night, and this is the night after he went by to show him some of the debris, and said, this was a non-event.
You did not see anything, period.
And the family didn't talk about it for another 25, 30 years.
Of course, we all hear stories of some very heavy people, security-wise, being involved around these operations.
And when they want to close a thing down, they can get very heavy indeed.
From what your grandfather said and maybe what your father said, just as interestingly, were there any indications of that kind of tactic being used?
My grandfather, yes, there's a story out there, and one of the true ones is that if he did not fall in line, that they'd find his bones in the desert.
And that was a true statement.
I've heard other people use that same statement in regards to themselves, but my father, or my grandfather, excuse me, did say that he was warned at one point that he was not to talk about it.
And this is where your dad comes into it, because all the accounts that we've read of this tell us that some exotic metal was brought home by Jesse Marcel Sr. so that his son could see it.
You know, you've never seen anything like this, son.
Strange hieroglyphic style writing on this.
And look at this metal.
It bends in ways that metal that we know about can't.
It doesn't fracture.
It goes back into shape and all the rest of it.
We've seen the popular fictional accounts and other accounts of this.
And then, of course, they were made to hand back this material.
What do you know of that?
Well, it's interesting is the actual story, inside story is, my grandfather, he collected some of the debris with the idea of going back to the base.
Well, it just happens that his residence in Roswell was somewhat on the way to the base.
And, you know, he was a high-level officer, so it's not like it wouldn't be like him to break protocol by not going right to the base.
But in his mind, he said, this is something very interesting.
It's not from here.
And if I don't show it to my family, they probably will never see it again.
He said, he felt it was going to get covered up right away.
So he wanted to show it to him.
So he brought this box of debris into his kitchen, spread it on the floor, then woke up my father and his wife and said, come take a look at this.
And his wife, VO, was essentially, what is this mess in my kitchen?
And he told my father, he said, you know, get down here.
Do you see anything like wires and tubes?
Of course, the technology at the time was tubes.
And anything like that and any of this debris, anything that could even resemble something like that.
And they couldn't.
He said, well, can we try to, it's a puzzle.
Can we try to fit any pieces together?
That was a dead end too.
And the hieroglyphics that he brought up, that was a very interesting point in that my father stood up to the, basically, a light in the kitchen over the sink and was holding what had a cross-section of an I-beam, a piece of metal about a foot long.
And he held it up there and just looking at it, just looked like a piece of silver metal, grayish silver metal.
And he found that if you put it in an angle, all of a sudden these symbols would appear.
And he's like, dad, dad, come take a look at this.
And my grandfather told him, he said, you know, you're probably the first human to see this alien language.
And that's kind of where that started.
So Jesse Marcel Sr., your grandfather, was pretty convinced.
Now, there are those who said down the years that maybe he'd convinced himself that perhaps the evidence wasn't that compelling, and perhaps there was a lot of UFO-style hype around, movies being made, that kind of thing.
He had just allowed himself to be swept up into a popular myth.
Yeah, and that story was around, but all I can speak to is, of course, the time that I was with him and growing up, and that would have never been true.
As a teenager, we all quest as teenagers.
I guess you must have asked your grandfather.
And, you know, I was like this, and I'm sure you were like this.
You spent time, quality time with your granddad.
You must have asked him about that.
Yeah, we talked about it.
I was fortunate enough.
He had a little bayou in the back of his house.
So we actually spent some summers out there fishing.
And the whole thing, and you bring up a very good point, and it's one that I haven't considered before, which is interesting enough, is that whatever was instilled in me from a young child, I didn't question it.
It's not something that I just wanted to believe in, but I did believe in.
And I think it was when my grandfather talked with such authority and such belief that even you're right, a teenage mind, you question everything.
That wasn't really a question.
It was actually, I think it's because at that time, through my father and grandfather, we grew up with a story.
And it really, not saying it took on a life of its own, but it was just a fact.
It wasn't, you know, my grandfather, father, definitely smart people.
I guess we believed in it wholeheartedly.
It wasn't even a question to any of us kids.
As your grandfather got older, and I want to return to the exotic material in just a moment, this question occurs to me.
I've got to get it out there.
Did your grandfather feel in any way embittered, upset even at the way that he'd been treated in respect of all of this?
Or is he one of the old style generation who simply did their duty, whatever that entailed?
A little insight of that.
He did his job to whatever detail.
It wasn't, you know, people look at like he really lived a pretty rough life.
He had this, people, he was downtrodden.
He was put down for it.
He was questioned about it.
I never saw any of that.
He was, he basically, not that he might have buried that down deep a little bit, but it was, you know, he talked with more excitement about it.
And, well, you know, dumb humans.
I mean, he didn't say that word, of course, but that's my mind.
You know, that we just weren't evolved enough to even consider this as being an obvious possibility.
But it really wasn't.
I mean, again, on the inside, he was involved in the nuclear bombing program in World War II, and you continue that through the Bikini Island, all those kind of things, the testing and the rest of it.
But he was deeply involved in that area of obviously being part of the air base.
And honestly, that's where his heart was.
If you want to see a man that was upset or hurting, that was from what happened in World War II, not about Roswell.
That's interesting, and that's interesting to hear for the first time and from a man who will know.
How did he feel about the popular accounts, the fictional accounts, the movie that appeared, the portrayal of this in the media?
Just with amusement.
More like most of these people don't have a clue what they're talking about, but not entirely.
I mean, it's kind of one thing that was very eye-opening to possibilities.
And if you're willing to open yourself to the idea of what happened was something that actually happened, and of course he believed in it, then you start, some of those things that might have seemed like they're a little bit out there, a little bit incomprehensible, became more of a potential reality.
Now, obviously, it's the same thing like you go back to the fictional series, go back to like Star Trek and 2001 Space Odyssey, those kind of things that came out.
They're all fictionalized, but they gave a certain, what do you want to call it, excitement to this idea, the potential for life.
And if I can kind of segue into this a little bit, back at the base, back at Wright Airfield, they put up some medical facilities.
And some of our NASA astronauts of later years did their time.
They cut their teeth back at Fort Pat, Wright-Pat.
And I have to think, and this is just my opinion, that Roswell actually, the story is coming out, that some people actually went into NASA because they wanted to find the truth themselves.
Some of our great astronauts knew about Roswell, and they went and did a little bit of studying, and then they ended up putting a career forward because of it.
Really?
And do you think that that applies to some of the people who went to the moon?
Yes, absolutely.
I think it had to play part of it.
Just this idea.
I mean, at the basis, yeah, NASA and the rest of these institutions, it's about science, it's about technology, it's about understanding.
But at the end of the day, in your gut, it's always about what else is out there.
And there is no better, you know, as far as not better story, I got the wrong word there, but Roswell kicked it off.
It opened our senses.
It basically, we grew up overnight when Roswell happened to that idea that something else is out there.
And, you know, there's, you know, like I said, there's still some people don't believe that Roswell was something.
I mean, but at the end of the day, and of course, my view is a little bit tainted because I'm within the family, but there isn't a question that whatever this was wasn't from here, that it was something that was amazing that happened to us.
I mean, well, I mean, obviously, there knows Voyager.
We sent something out into space back then.
I mean, thinking that it was impossible, there's nothing that might be a little bit smarter than us, a little bit more technologically advanced, couldn't have done something similar or much more advanced with some kind of life form on it and sent it out into the universe.
You know, it's just, it boils down to that statement.
It's like, are we so egotistical to believe that we are the only ones capable of doing anything?
And those people who deny what is said to have happened at Roswell back in 47, I think, need to bear in mind this, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it because it comes straight from the horse's mouth.
Of course it does.
In order to lie about this, you would have had to have promulgated the details of a lie across three generations.
I would think that would be almost impossible to do, wouldn't you?
Absolutely, and nonsensical.
It's just why, you know, again, perpetuate that lie.
Why would my grandfather have even told his grandkids about it or with enthusiasm talked to his grandkids about it?
He had nothing to prove at that point.
He was long retired.
There was no real reason for him to bring this story to the family.
And then again, my father, one morning back in the middle 70s, he walked in the back.
We live in some acreage out in Montana in the middle of nowhere.
Walked out with a Pulaski and started digging a hole.
And within a few months, he had built the biggest telescope in Montana, a big reflective telescope, just so he could get closer to the stars.
It's just like, it's those kind of steps that, you know, this touched him deeply, obviously.
It's like you wouldn't live your life this way from a lie.
And your dad, the original Jesse Marcel's son, your dad, the story goes, played with this exotic material that his father brought home to show him because he thought it was important that the family knew about something momentous before the whole world descended upon that place.
What are the stories your dad tells you about actually touching that stuff?
You know, an interesting thing that was brought up about, you know, if you're familiar with the story, you've heard about this, you know, and this is in our term, a Marcel.
We didn't come up with this idea, but the idea of memory metal.
You could basically hold a piece of it, bunch it up in your hand, let it go, and it came back to be smooth, like almost like a fluid, but it was kind of between a fluid state and a hardened state anyway.
The I-beams, those held the greatest fascination because of their markings on them and that kind of thing, where we were Airbus trying to figure out what could that mean, those kind of things.
But as far as that goes, it obviously attached to my father as far as, I mean, that was his biggest memory of it, was Holeman Debris.
Like I said, that short experience of that evening was enough to change his life.
Well, it would be.
If you've touched something that does Not emanate from this planet, it is believed, then it has to be a life changer.
It doesn't matter how old you are.
Absolutely.
And, you know, there's always, not to go on the conspiracy side of it, all these people say, well, he was a kid, 12 years old.
He wouldn't know what he was holding.
He had models of the X1 hanging over his bed, that kind of thing, in tissue paper and balsam, those kind of things.
And it's kind of like, at 12 years old, could you tell the difference between a piece of metal and a piece of wood?
Could you tell the difference between what would have been the government story of a piece of scotch tape on a stick versus some hieroglyphs that appear in light?
All these kind of things.
It's just interesting how the story went.
But as far as my father went, it was never, he was always open.
He's always saying, if you can prove to me it was something else, I'm always open to listening to your story.
You know, what was this?
If it wasn't what we thought it was, what was it?
He was always open about that.
But honestly, everything he'd seen and understood up to that point, up to the point of his passing, was absolutely this was something from somewhere else.
Jesse, you being a kid, I've been a kid, we've all been kids.
What I'd have done as a kid in Liverpool, because we were all pretty rebellious there, I probably would have endeavored to keep part of this.
Are you telling me that down these years, the truth is that none of this was retained by your grandfather or your dad?
They didn't keep a little bit.
No, they didn't.
There is one story that there might be some truth to, two stories.
One is that the next morning, my grandmother swept out the back door any little remnants, the remnants that might have been left from the craft, from the pieces.
And it might be underneath a concrete slab.
So there's that.
The other one is that he was pretty good friends with his boss back at the base.
He and his wife would come over and they play bridge.
And one night they came over with a piece of the debris.
This is months after everything has settled down.
And with an I-beam on my grandfather, and he looked at the window and kind of looked at the hieroglyphs and that kind of thing on it.
And there's always been a question if that didn't end up somewhere.
And was within within the, you know, when my grandfather passed away, it was pretty much instant.
And, you know, who knows?
You know, I wish I could say more than that.
And of course, as we said, you lost your dad two years ago, thereabouts.
He couldn't shed any light on any of that?
No, he didn't give to speculation, but no, he wasn't aware of something.
I know he didn't have anything.
Your father had a lifelong duty, you know, as the father.
I have a father, and if anybody made claims about my father, I would want to defend his honor, his reputation, until I leave this earth, shuffle off this mortal coil.
And your dad did that for his dad.
Did he ever talk to you about the battle that he faced?
Not to clear his father's name, but to make sure the story was straight.
You know, he absolutely, from my father's eyes talking about his father, it was never a question about the reality of what they had looked at that night.
That my grandfather was beyond reproach because of the things he does.
He wouldn't have held the kind of position he did in our military at the time if he wasn't the kind of man that had the stature to be believable.
And some people said, well, he was given to fancy.
It's like, would he be the head of intelligence if he was nothing more than a dreamer?
And then we've had that kind of conversation before.
But no, definitely he stood by him and he had no reason not to.
It's basically the story, the story was concrete.
It stayed with the family.
It never changed, that kind of thing.
And as far as defending him, as far as, yes, there was a time in our history where it might have been a little bit risky to openly talk about this.
And my grandfather felt that too.
Obviously, later on, he decided to go ahead and talk to people about it.
In fact, he was a big ham radio operator.
And he was discussing with somebody else, I'm not quite sure who it was, of course, about what had happened back in Roswell.
And that kind of blew the whole thing open.
In what way?
After like the two.
Oh, you know, it was interesting is that somebody else heard this conversation going on.
And within, I don't know, within days to weeks of that conversation on ham radio, it kind of went around the world again.
And that's where it hit one of the local papers.
And physicists came in and interviewed my grandfather about it.
And that's where everything kind of opened up.
And what was said, just give me a flavor of what was said in that conversation.
It's very, very basic.
My grandfather was reserved.
He was careful about what he said.
The biggest thing is he would state exactly what he saw in the, there was supposed two to three crash sites.
But the crash site that he was heavily involved in, he just spoke exactly what he went there, what he saw on the fields, and a little thing about the size of the field, the amount of debris they found, those sort of things, what kind of the debris was.
And that, again, once it was back at the base, that it was told to be a non-event.
Right.
That it was actually, it was in the process of being covered up on its way back from the field.
I mean, that whole part, that whole idea, it got out of hand real quickly at the very beginning.
And the attempt to at least get control of it and then, you know, as they say, cover up happened fairly quickly.
There were more people involved in this than a few security people, the base commander, and your grandfather.
There were a whole raft of other people.
I mean, for example, if there was a crashed craft and there were aliens on the crashed craft and there were debris and artifacts all over the place, then a vast array of people would have had to have been brought in.
And over time, wouldn't some of those people have been inclined to speak about what they went through?
And they have.
There's a researcher, Don Schmidt, who's actually has done a lot of work in that area, talking to a lot of the people involved, getting there's a book that just came out called Deathbed Confessions.
It's basically a lot of the people that are still alive or near the end of their life that were somehow involved.
He actually went out and did a lot of research that way.
What's interesting is as far as Roswell and that generation, which is unfortunately coming to fast, embraced the story.
And it really wasn't believers.
There was a lot more going on in Roswell than just the crash.
There was a lot of strange things seen in the night before, nights leading up to that crash.
There's kind of a famous story of a nun was outside, and she saw a blue ball that basically flew through town.
And there's just stories all over the place about multiple lights going right over Roswell, right around that valley out there, right around the desert in that area.
So there's a lot of people that saw a lot of strange things in the skies.
And actually, it kind of led up to this.
And what did your dad and your granddad make of the stories that have propounded for many, many years about the possibility that all of the events at Roswell in 47 were some kind of smokescreen for some top-secret project and some technology that Washington didn't want the world to know about?
So we'll concoct a weird story about aliens, muddy the waters terribly, even if it produces somebody's reputation.
You know, you've got to break eggs to make an omelette.
That's the way to deal with it.
So you create a smokescreen of a story.
You maybe sacrifice somebody's career, but what the hell?
But actually, the origins of all of this stuff, terrestrial, not extraterrestrial.
Those stories were everywhere, and all I can say is nobody believed them.
My father, being a military man himself, he retired as a colonel.
Obviously, my grandfather ended up being a lieutenant colonel.
But they knew the modus operandi.
They knew how things worked.
And they knew the attempts would be made and put out there.
So it was just, I wouldn't say, I guess the word amusing would be the best.
At all this money and all this time being spent over decades to cover up a non-event.
Like I said, I would say it's more amusing.
They didn't believe in any of it.
And what about the material then?
If this material was recovered and taken somewhere, presumably it's still there.
It is, and that's of great interest to me and anybody else that's interested in this area.
But it should be somewhere.
I mean, there should be parts of it somewhere if it's in a crate buried in some, you know, like the latest Indiana Jones from a decade ago now or whatever it was, where it could be in a warehouse somewhere that has been forgotten or not forgotten, but tagged and put somewhere, or it's in the middle of being studied more deeply somewhere else, you know, in the United States or somewhere in the world.
I don't know.
So, Jesse Marcel III, do you feel the weight of history pressing on your shoulders?
Do you feel that you really have to make a breakthrough on this before you shuffle off this earth?
You know, I have a kind of a different way to look at things.
I believe 100% with every fiber of my body that life exists in the universe.
Not even a question.
If you're willing to believe that life exists in the universe, then are you willing to believe that maybe that life existed before we did?
Are there civilizations more advanced than we are?
Well, it's not too hard to figure out that some of these Earth-liker planets out there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of millions of years older than us.
Once you start going down that road, where do you stop?
Well, would we try to reach out?
Would we try to travel to the nearest planets?
Well, heck yes.
We travel to the nearest stars if we have technology?
Of course.
So it kind of comes down to at what point do you stop believing?
It's like, in which stage, oh, well, yes, there's life on other planets, but no, they wouldn't want to be researched.
They wouldn't want to see if there's other life out there.
I don't believe that.
How close technologically are we to being able to reach out to the stars?
There's some astounding things being done right now with travel that operates outside of the envelope of light speed where we could be at a nearest star in a year.
And we're there.
Take us forward 100 years, 1,000 years.
Well, of course, we would be out there searching for their life.
No question about it in some form or another.
So where I'm at is it's almost so obvious that life exists in the universe.
And anything, if you're more advanced, yes, you'd be out there looking for their life in the universe.
No question.
I think they'd be just like us.
So as far as that goes, I don't need somebody else to tell me that, yes, it was real.
I've never felt that way.
I've always had such a strong belief in life in the universe that to me, it doesn't really matter if my government comes out and says, oh, it was real.
It doesn't make a difference.
As far as people around me, strangers that come up to me, that kind of thing, people want to believe.
The general psyche of everybody comes up to me is that they want to be told that, yes, this was real, that yes, life exists in the universe.
Because I think they have people, it's an innate strength we have as in our humanity is that we do want to believe there's more out there.
And like I said, it's become a very positive thing as people think this is just really, really part of who we are.
Your dad was a medical man.
He had a very serious and good career, but he still found time to talk about these things as he got older.
What were his reflections on all of this?
The experience of his father, his own lifetimes, not crusade, but perhaps battle to make sure the truth got out there.
What were his thoughts in his final years?
Some of the last thoughts he had were more centered around he wish that our government would have released a factual statement saying that, yes, Roswell is real.
He really wanted that to come out in his lifetime.
That was one of the last things that I remember him talking about anyway, is that he would really wish that they would have come forward.
And do you believe, I see that one of the people who kind of tangentially touched on some of this stuff, but seems to be walking away from it now was Hillary Clinton.
I'm sure you've been reading that stuff.
Hillary at one point was being touted as perhaps being in favor of opening the files, whatever may be in them.
Sure, yeah.
There's every presidency has somebody that comes forward that wants to get into it.
And from back from Bill Clinton, he wanted to break the story or talk about the story and investigate it.
It seems like through the cycles of presidencies, at some point, the president wants to go in and say, so what's Roswell stuff?
What happened?
And it becomes public and then it's snuffed out.
You hear someone through an aide or through the president or a vice president or somebody at a high level in our government comes out and says, yeah, we are going to get to the bottom of this finally.
And then as soon as it becomes public, it disappears.
Did anybody ever try and lean on your dad?
Lean on would be a strong word.
We knew that we were being listened to our phone conversations.
An example is one time my father was setting up a vacation for the family to go down to Disneyland.
And he'd called down and they were setting up hotel rooms and that sort of thing.
And he called up to actually talk to my mother and said that, oh, hey, I got us, this is where we're set up at.
And he was in his business office.
This is what we're going to be doing.
And that night he came home and told the story.
He said he hung up from the phone, got a call 30 seconds later and said, hey, hey, Doc, we understand you're going to be in Los Angeles in a month, and we'd like a chance to talk to you.
So nobody was hiding that they were listening to us.
In no way were they hiding.
And they said, you're going to be in room 325.
Looks like you're checking in this morning.
We'd like a chance to come and talk to you.
And when they said we, who was we?
It was one of the people the creator of the Mogul Balloon Project, one of the researchers behind it.
And he basically, it was some department with the government that was behind the balloon story anyway.
And they wanted to meet with my father to basically sit down in a room and say, what you saw was a weather balloon.
What you saw was a raw wind target.
Wasn't it?
My God.
How many years after Roswell was that?
Oh, that would have been 35, 40.
So you're saying that three or four decades on from Roswell, the powers that be still wouldn't let it go?
No, they were trying to get a statement from my dad.
They were trying to convince my dad to say something to discredit the story.
And they said, I think they brought a little piece of Raw and Target with them and they said, this is what you saw, wasn't it?
And my father, his response was, he said, well, you know, it was a piece of foil basically they brought in and had a paper backing.
And he said, well, you know, it's not too dissimilar, but what I saw didn't have a paper backing on it.
It was very light.
So it's like a feather.
It almost had no weight to it.
They said, what you're showing me is different than what I had seen.
So they were convinced, trying to convince your father.
Absolutely.
Of what they were trying to convince your grandfather and having no success on both accounts 30 odd years apart.
Yes, this is exactly what happened.
Decades later, they're still trying to convince my father after not being able to convince my grandfather to say something.
And they came out with a little report saying my father agreed with them, and there was no truth to that at all.
And I've all been told that through the press and that kind of thing.
I've actually seen that report, but they definitely, they were trying to get him to say something.
Did your dad worry about any of this, that perhaps his private life was not private?
That there were people trying to stop the story getting out?
That would make me feel uneasy.
You know, I don't know if it was because he was in the military himself and that kind of thing.
No, there was really not, we never had to worry about it.
He never had to worry about it.
He was, you know, just, they said, you know, things are going to happen, things aren't going to happen, but I'm not going to spend any time worrying about him.
So, no, it was never really.
I think that point in our life, in his life, he was just accepted that was the role.
And what was going to happen was going to happen.
He was offered protection one time by a government agency that if something was to come after him or his family.
And he basically responded in these basic childhood conversations or high school at that time, that he responded to them that no, we had never felt we were in danger.
And it's true, we didn't.
So one armature of the government was, you're saying, offering him protection from another armature?
The head of the Senate Appropriations Committee were basically what happened, he was called into a meeting and he was asked, actually, it was almost for an opinion.
Really, the whole, having him involved in the meeting was kind of a strange thing.
He was sitting in a room with the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and he said, our purpose is not to credit or discredit Roswell.
None of that.
What we're trying to do is find out how monies, tax dollars were being spent to cover up Roswell.
They couldn't get to the, they're trying to find out how some government or some offices, some department within our government was able to funnel tax dollars for their own use.
Right.
And so in order to be able to take statements from all involved parties, you have to make sure that your dad remained safe.
Yeah, yes.
And they basically said that we're trying to get to the bottom of how tax dollars are being funneled away.
And in that meeting, he just basically said, you know, if your family ever feels in danger, here's my number.
Now, isn't that interesting?
Because that would indicate that somebody somewhere thought that a way of getting the truth out there was not to probe the issue itself, but to probe the money, to follow the money around it, and then the truth would get out.
Sounds like that was somebody's plan.
I agree.
I mean, there was obviously interest.
I mean, at the beginning of the meeting, he basically threw down a book in front of my father, which was kind of a fictionalized depiction of Roswell.
But he basically told my father saying, this is a real event.
Roswell happened.
And my dad said, well, I know that.
So I think there are people.
I can't believe that there's quite a number of people in our government that want to know more.
I'm sure some do.
What about aliens from the wreckage?
What do you know about them?
The biggest thing I can say about that, and that's for my grandfather, is that the people, they compartmentalize everything from the second crash site, if you're familiar with people familiar with the story that contained aliens.
He basically said that all I can tell you is that the people that talked about the story, you can believe it.
So he kept at arm's length from it, but he also basically backed the people that said that there were aliens in the second crash site.
Do you believe that later in his life your grandfather was still in touch with people who were part of those events?
You know, That's an interesting question.
I can't believe he wasn't.
There was one thing, and it's kind of disturbing.
I don't like to think about it too much, but he was given an interview to a gal in college in Cordelia back, this would have been the middle 80s or so, early 80s.
And he went through the story with her because she was doing a college project.
She came out to the house in HOMA, she was going to LSU.
And they went through the story, and he kind of went through it, didn't really talk about the story any more than he's talked about in the past.
But he just kind of went through the whole thing.
They enjoyed some good conversations.
And my grandfather called her back, absolutely panicked, and said, you cannot let anybody know that we had these conversations.
Something had happened to him between those meetings with this gal for the school project and then her actually going to be releasing a paper on it.
And he basically, I begged is too strong word, but told her, please don't talk about this to anybody.
Don't, you know, I can't.
Something, it sure seemed like something got to him saying that you've talked enough.
You know, let's just bury this in the past.
And he died just within days of that.
But looking at you, you're not letting this lie, are you?
No, no.
The government has done a very good job and part of the people have done a very good job of being able to, if you can't attack what I consider facts, I mean, there's lots of paperwork.
There's lots of orders, a scan thing out there showing what happened.
If you can't attack the information, then go ahead and attack the people or attack the story.
So it's now changed into, well, you're crazy if you believe what you say.
You're given to nonsense.
Basically try to create an aura around the story that if you believe there's such a thing as a UFO or alien life, then you're just a fool.
And they did a very good job of it.
That was the best cover-up there ever could have been, is get the public all nodding that direction, that if you believe in this, then it's nonsense and you're not to be believed.
So it doesn't matter what you had in your hands.
It's like, no, the public, without you, you're just something.
And that worked, I mean, for, you know, I would say through the 80s, maybe in the early 90s, but now it's just, it's a new generation.
People really want to know, I mean, they want to know the truth, but they're a lot more accepting.
They want to listen to the true story.
They want to listen to, you know, what are those possibilities and not just given to the idea, oh, it's nonsense.
They can't pay the truth of this.
Or the other side where some people are so dedicated to it that there's no question.
But that middle ground, they really want, people would love the idea that there is life out there.
But of course, facts are facts and suppositions are suppositions.
People may want to believe that and it may ultimately not be true.
I guess the quest for facts is a very scientific thing.
And what do you want to do to make sure that the facts of this, whatever they may be, get up?
This is where I'm at on it.
Rosa was long enough ago that the material has been brushed up.
It's gone.
obviously it's somewhere that I've just been, I've been lucky enough to go to some, And I was lucky enough to meet with a lot of folks who came forward with some stories, military governments, those sort of things.
And then you start seeing that the Roswell is not a unique event.
There are other Roswell-type events that have happened around the world.
So what sort of stories were you told on your book tour?
Oh, just everything from something, a crash in Argentina where they actually have some of the debris.
And the Air Force, their aerial anomalies division has some of the debris.
And they were wanting to see, well, how closely does the debris we have match Roswell's?
And I have an open invitation to go down and talk to them and look and hold the material and see what I think of it.
Just those kind of things.
Talking to military pilots that have actually engaged with 500 people on the ground watching a dogfight of some orb of some kind of light going around an airbase.
Just those kind of things.
Have you talked to those pilots?
Oh, yes.
And what did they tell you?
Oh, just without question, I love this one story on Birdway where this pilot was talking about, he said something was basically going over their airbase, one of their Air Force bases.
And they scrambled two jets to knock it down.
They don't know what it was, but it wasn't supposed to be there.
So they were trying to dogfight something.
And they said that it moved so much faster than their jets were capable of.
He had his hands out and he was motioning.
He was a pilot showing how the attitude of the airplanes.
I took it straight up and thinking that, well, I'll do it straight up and I'll come back down and I can get more speed at it that way.
And he says, I'm going straight up, straight up, straight up.
And I'm starting to lose speed.
I look out my window and this thing is right outside his window just following him up in the air.
He said at that point he called in and they just landed their planes and said, forget it.
They have absolutely no way to even interact with whatever this thing was.
And they had the orders.
They had the physical orders in my hands showing it.
You know, the government orders depicting what had happened and the orders and the process and the radar and that kind of thing.
So it's, you know, maybe our government is still not talking too much about it.
Other governments are.
Things are happening out there.
And what things do you think might be happening?
Do you think there's a head of steam building to more revelation?
Yes, I think, you know, I don't know if you could say there's more.
You know, we're being visited more often, that we're being looked at more carefully than we were in the past, or we're just noticing more.
Or there's more, you know, obviously we have technology that didn't exist before, so there's a lot of things that we see are just basically loner.
What I was really getting at, driving at there, was the thought that with these people in South America being perhaps a little more open about these things, do you think there's a groundswell beginning to build that will blow the lid off the truth of all of this, assuming this is the truth?
Yes, absolutely.
But a groundswell might not be the way to look at it because they believe.
They already believe.
They build monuments like a sighting as a religious experience.
So it's not so much that they need to get to the point of a belief.
They already do.
It's not put in question that whatever these beings are that are visiting us, that it's almost a holy experience.
If I were you, Generation 3, of course I would feel driven to do more about this, but I would feel like a very, very small person facing off against a very big machine.
Does that ever make you afraid, trepidatious about it all?
You know, and I've been asked that question a number of times.
All I do is I talk about it very openly and to a lot of people.
And I think that is the protection, is that the more I talk about it, the more people listen.
And I have a sister and brother that are obviously an older sister and younger brother, excuse me.
And we talk about it as well.
And so there is that machine out there, like you say, but we just talk about it very openly.
And it's, I guess, kind of like where my father is.
Well, if something was to happen, it's going to happen.
But I really don't have that fear.
And I have a young family and that kind of thing.
But it's like it's a different generation.
I go, when I drop my kids off of school, the kids are excited to talk about Roswell or talk about UFOs or whatever.
And I've even signed some of my books to some of the teachers.
And people, it's a different time.
And I think it's almost, I want to say we're all the way there, but there's so much belief that there's stuff going on out there that it's not as popular as it used to be because there isn't as much conspiracy.
It's almost a given that there is something there.
The ultimate truth of our lives is that they are finite.
We don't want to go, but we have to, all of us.
By the time your time comes, that you've been walking this journey with your grandfather, he, of course, had to leave the walk, and your father left the walk two years ago.
There will come a point when lamentably you will have to too.
What would you like to have achieved by that point?
Just that I completely supported my father and grandfather and that I believe absolutely that we are part of something much bigger.
And that this life and, you know, and the word UFO almost minimizes the whole concept, that this is actually just basically there's so much more out there than what we understand.
And hopefully we'll grasp it all.
As far as you know, is anybody still alive from the Roswell event?
I am not familiar.
Every so often, somebody will give us a call and we do a little bit of a background and find out that they might not have said everything they, you know, that they weren't actually stationed at the air base.
You know, obviously it's possible they'd be in their late 80s.
Again, back to John Schmidt.
He did some research.
There are, I think there's a few people out there, but not that I'm aware of that I speak with directly anyway.
Or even the sons or grandsons, just like you and your dad, of people who were involved.
It would be interesting to connect with them, wouldn't it?
Oh, yes.
And there's like Brazell, the rancher.
Some of his descendants had talked about it for a little while because they had actually brought a little piece of it to one of their barns out of the field.
And basically, this has been some years now, as the story goes, it was told to me through my father, that one of the ranchers was openly talking about it at a bar at a corona in New Mexico and saying, yeah, we still have a little piece of that thing.
It's pretty exciting.
And some people showed up at his door the next morning demanding the government property.
And again, this was decades after it happened.
And at that point, their families decided, we're done with this thing.
We're not going to talk about it anymore.
We're sick of it.
So they were warned off.
Yes, they're warned.
They said, we want our government property.
And period, I wasn't in the conversation, of course.
I'm assuming that they demanded their property and they'd better be done with it, I suppose.
There was a radio station involved in this as well that broadcast the news in the Roswell area.
As far as I understand it from my reading of it, the people running that radio station, the news editor, they were pretty swiftly closed down or forced to close the story down, weren't they?
Oh, yes, they were.
The reports, they had, see, I've seen the newspapers, they announced they actually had found a flying saucer and then that they had it in one of the, anyway, on the base, that sort of thing.
And that was squashed almost as fast as it came out within hours.
You have a family.
Do you have a son?
Yes, I have a son that's 12 and a daughter is 10.
Would you like your son and daughter to carry this forward?
Yes, they have no choice.
It's part of our genes.
Yes, definitely.
And they were indoctrinated, you know, children of this age.
There were no cartoons that didn't have some influence with alien life in it somewhere.
Everything.
It's part of everything.
And to them, it's really not a, there's not even a question of the reality of Roswell or of my grandfather or great-grandfather's story or the rest of it.
It's just part of them.
And it's definitely not a negative thing.
Your father, what did he see his task as being through his life?
After, you know, as his father got older and eventually died, what did your father see as his role in this?
You know, I think it was twofold.
He spoke very publicly open about it.
Anybody that wanted to listen to the story, he'd be happy to tell him.
Another was a personal journey, just in understanding a connection with whatever it is that's out there.
And that's what really drove him that part of his life anyway, is to maintain that connection or get that connection with something else out there.
Right.
And what would you, as we look forward into the next year, the next five years, you know, say we reconvene this conversation five years from now.
What's that going to be?
I lose track of time, 2021.
What would you like to have achieved by then?
Irrefutable proof or connection with an alien life form.
Whether it's something swimming through the oceans on a planet or on a moon around Jupiter, or something as far as Chinese are billing this large dish to try to listen in on hopefully some kind of alien speak somewhere out there.
Just more openness that way, that we have more irrefutable evidence that can't be simply covered up by a single government.
Have you ever spoken to Seth Szostak, the man who runs SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
No, I have not.
My father had, but no, I have not.
Really?
Did your father report back on that?
Just my father was always upset with SETI, and it wasn't because of the basis of SETI.
It's just that the parameters of proof of a signal coming from a foreign, you know, from an alien, let's say, or civilization had to go through such a rigorous program that he thought that it was way too tight to actually be able to prove a signal existed.
He thought that it should have been, you know, evidence, some of the evidence of signals they received were definitely unexplainable.
But because they didn't repeat themselves, they were immediately dismissed.
And he always thought that was a crime.
He said, no, it's obvious.
I mean, whatever signal that was, it was a signal.
It only came through once.
That doesn't disregard that.
There couldn't be some truth to it.
And just, you know, anyway, yeah.
So he wasn't excited about that idea anyway.
There was a lot more going on.
Well, I've spoken to Seth Szostak several times.
Always seems to be a nice, amenable guy.
I think that you should make contact with him, and I'd love to hear the outcome of your discussion.
Bob, I'd be happy to.
I never have, yes.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll look out his contact details and pass them on to you.
Well, thank you.
You are also involved because you, just like your dad, your eyes are on the skies.
Your current project is designing a flying car.
Talk to me about that.
Yeah, it's just, you know, what it is.
And my father, he was a doctor, but he's actually, he was a very brilliant physicist and an absolute genius.
And he instilled a certain way of looking at things as we grew up.
And I always was fascinated with different principles, physics.
And, you know, I always thought there should be some way to put a dent in gravity, to be able to change the way gravity affects mass to mass.
So I always tinkered around lays and machines and developing little devices trying to minimize mass, change the mass of something through a given process.
And I went from there thinking, well, okay, I have something that at least momentarily looks like it can alter mass.
Sounds kind of far-fetched, but it's interesting.
And I thought, well, it'd be good to have a platform.
How can I really study this?
How can I try to keep playing with these machines and try to actually get one to actually have an effect, a vector, an inertia, that kind of thing?
And I thought, okay, I need to build this stable platform that will basically depict the motions of it.
And that's where the idea of a flying car came from.
And it wasn't supposed to be a flying car.
But I do have a background.
I'm a big sports car fan of those sort of things.
And so I came up with a design for a car that could basically hover, or flying car, they call them, personal vehicles.
And the whole thing developed from there.
I developed this design for a flying car.
And then I went through and applied all their technologies, went through, worked with a lot of engineers, and we came with a design concept.
And we're actually just about ready to go into production with it.
Really?
How stable is it?
Because instability has been the big problem for everybody who's tried this.
You know, it's based on a gyroscope.
The car is basically a flying gyroscope.
So in other words, it should be inherently stable.
Yes.
In fact, it's stable to the point where if you're piloting the thing and you lose control, just let go.
You lose control of the whole of the craft.
Just let go.
It'll ride itself and go back to a steady hover.
And it's not just aerial robotics has come a large distance in the last five years.
So we're applying the latest computer technology, GPS, centering, all that kind of thing.
So everything that's going on around there, going on out there is helping us.
Right.
And is this going to be more than just a concept car?
Is this something that might actually get into mass production?
Yes.
Although, just because of the rules and regulations, we're looking at doing a car show in Dubai in 2017 where we're going to display the car and have some flight tests and that sort of thing and go to market with it.
And we're coming back to this country as basically a hover car.
So basically we're containing, we're governing the height that it can fly, restricting it to off-road vehicle parks, those kind of things.
And so we're going to bring it back to the back to the United States and then go from there.
Canada, we're looking at a French market right now.
One of the states here, Kentucky, has talked to me because they'd like to somehow be involved because of the problems with coal.
And that's one of their big production, one of their largest means for product out there is through coal production or mining.
And they want to get involved and say, well, can we make this thing, Kentucky, the first state that's legal to have one of these just to use that, bring back, well, manufacturing back here and that kind of thing to bring back some livelihood.
So gyroscopically controlled, how is it you have to put petrol, gasoline into it?
No, it's all electric.
Okay.
Completely electric.
And it flies at what kind of speed?
You don't, there's a number of variables that dictate how fast you could go with it.
It's not a very light craft.
It's actually fairly heavy.
But you have a certain, it's about the size of a, if somebody like to go on our website and take a look at it.
It's airbornemotors.com.
If you're going off, it involves five different rotors.
The main rotor that develops the thrust is really a gyroscope.
So if you're going about, if you're flying this thing and you're in a level space, if you're flying it level, then the corner fans, the corner rotors, will dictate the speed based on the airflow going through the fans and how fast it exits.
Not very fast, you know, 40, 60 miles per hour, if you're saying here.
Now, if you're to tilt the craft and use the thrust from the main rotor, then it really, you know, you could probably go a few hundred miles an hour.
It just would, that wouldn't, that really is an idea behind it.
And you haven't told me yet what kind of height that would be.
It's governed right now at 10 feet, very, very low for safety.
If you were to go 10 feet off the ground and crash, the amount of energy you'd be adding to the impact would be about the same as a skydiver when they land.
So that's part of the idea of safety.
Now, given that it has plenty of energy, it could go up high enough that you'd run out of air.
But typically in a sport aircraft in the United States, under FAA regulations, you're talking about 3,500 feet.
So it could easily operate in that airspace without a problem.
And so you're taking this to France in 2017.
Oh, Dubai, yes.
Dubai, rather, in 2017.
Lots of interest in this.
When do you think we're going to be able to go into a showroom somewhere and buy one?
And what would we have to pay?
Well, the first ones are already being snapped up.
People have already are coming to us and they say, you've got pre-orders already.
This is what's happening.
People say, I want to be the first person in this state to own one.
I want to be the first person in this country to own one.
And so that's all going on.
But what's interesting around this whole story is a foundation came back to me because the car has a certain sex appeal to it.
And it looks like the kind of thing a sci-fi movie might have created back.
It's kind of the way people, when they dream about a flying vehicle, this is kind of what they depict.
And so they've come to me and now they want to put together, we're going to do a road show.
And it's basically to instill excitement and engineering into young kids.
And so we're going to have a scale show car going around this country anyway on a semi with a big show that's going to go all over the schools.
You're going to be the Buffalo Bill of the flying car world doing a roadshow.
It's going to be a road show.
Things are going so fast.
A local university has, we've met with them.
The hover car is not the only thing I've done.
I also have it in patents on basically skis, articulating hoverboards, you could say.
And they're actually going to create a class in the university to produce them.
We're working with a vets organization, veterans, that are for educational purposes teaching composite technologies.
And they're going to be building them.
So it's just interesting how everything around me is now focusing on all this technology.
And it's a lot of fun.
I'll tell you, I've never had a better time.
The quotes, flying car, you haven't told me when this thing gets into production, how much money I would have to find to buy one.
Ah, back to that statement.
Well, $25,000, $50,000, $500,000.
The first ones are going to be north of $250,000 American dollars.
And those are going to be strictly customs.
It's basically they're going to be very, very, very limited production.
And then as we get our feet underneath us, they're going to, you know, ideally, because of the, you know, we're basically almost having to create every part in the car, most of it anyway, that with anything, economies of size, we'll be able to reduce that cost down to, you know, the size of a mid-sized car, you know, $45,000, $55,000.
I think your dad and your grandfather will be very proud of you.
You know, that is one thing that stings a little bit is that my father died before I started really getting involved in this.
I mean, to the point, I was always sketching, you know, always had his ideas.
But for the actual, I've just had some incredible people come along, get hold of me.
They've seen the car.
They want to be part of it.
And unfortunately, it's really gotten legs underneath it after my father's passed.
So it would have been nice to have shared it with him.
But I kind of believe, you know, there's more going on out there.
Maybe he sees what's going on from where he's at.
Look, we Brits find it a little indelicate to talk about money.
You're a little more open about these things in the States.
How much money have you put into the project?
You don't.
Maybe you find it indelicate, too.
I have accountants all the time asking me that.
Can I just tell you it's been a five-year project consuming thousands of hours?
Well, yeah, well, I don't know.
If I said half a million dollars, if I said a million dollars, I probably wouldn't even be close, would I?
No, no, no, don't have it.
Oh, definitely.
It's been a labor of love.
I have more pure hours at my hands doing this than anything else.
Boy.
And then there's lots of people that are willing to work for stock in the company, just to be part of it.
I want my name to be part of your team.
And I said, well, you know, at this point, we're actually just working on becoming a public company.
But it's basically saying if you want to come along as an engineer or as a partner of some kind, then you're going to have to take stock if you do it that way.
And are you not afraid that one of the big multinationals is not going to come out with something similar first?
You know, I have some very good attorneys who've patented everything you could possibly imagine.
That doesn't say that somebody else is not going to.
But anymore, obviously, in the United States, we're probably one of the most litigious countries in the world, and everybody's happy to see everybody else.
And it becomes such an expense if somebody tries to build something similar to what we're doing, that it's going to take a space of one of our patents.
It's easier to work a deal with them and become a partner with them and do a licensing agreement with them rather than going after them in court for breaking your patent.
So at the very, the way I see it, and I might be in the clouds, is that if somebody wants to come and do something we're doing, hopefully we get together on it.
And in the meantime, while you're doing all of this, you are trying to further the cause of the truth of Roswell.
Yes.
How are you going to find time for all of that?
You know, it's just, I guess Roswell is second nature.
You know, I'm actually, there's a TV series called Ancient Aliens.
They're flying me down next week to do one of their shows on Roswell, I think, something like that.
I'm doing a documentary right now or working on a documentary.
It's all these things come together, but individually by themselves, honestly, there's enough time.
And with the companies, I have some great people that have come along.
So I'm able to kind of send responsibilities to a number of people and make time.
So it's a labor of love.
So it doesn't seem like staying up till three in the morning working on a project is no big deal because I love it.
We've got to talk again.
People are going to want to know about you.
I presume You've got multiple websites.
Which one would you like to direct them to?
The main one right now is the car company, which is Airborne with an Emotors.com.
Jesse Marcel III, I wish you well in everything that you do, and I hope we can talk again.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
I'm enjoying myself.
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