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July 8, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
57:28
Edition 648 - Roswell 75
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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 of this is The Unexplained.
I hope that your life is treating you especially well at the moment, whether you're Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, East or West, I hope that things are good and thank you very much for your ongoing communications.
Not going to do shout-outs on this edition, because I have something that I think is important to do.
I'm going to let you hear some of the material from my recent television special about the 75th anniversary in July, during July, of the Roswell incident.
Now, if you found this show, I'm sure you know what Roswell was all about, but you will be hearing things that I don't think you have heard before.
So the way I'm going to start it on this edition, with my thanks to Adam, my webmaster, by the way, I'm going to start this edition with the soundtrack of a little video we put together for the beginning of the show.
It's two minutes long.
This is the soundtrack, and it is me basically explaining the ups and downs and ins and outs of what happened, they say, at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
This week, 75 years ago, rancher W.W. Mac Brazil found wreckage on his property in New Mexico, about 75 miles north of a place called Roswell.
Some flying disc and flying saucer stories had already appeared in the national press that summer, and that led Brazil to believe the wreckage, that included rubber strips, tin foil and paper, might be something like that.
He took some of this material to the local sheriff George Wilcox, who then told Colonel William Blanchard, the commanding officer of the Roswell Army Airfield, or RAAF.
The following day, the RAAF released a statement, writing that, The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force Roswell Army Airfield was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chavez County.
According to that statement, Major Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer, oversaw the RAAF's investigation of the crash site and the recovered material.
The story made a local newspaper.
There was even a radio report reputedly heard by British-Canadian entertainer and impresario Huey Green as he drove across America.
That's another story.
U.S. Army officials quickly backtracked on their flying saucer claim, saying in a now infamous release the debris was actually from a weather balloon, releasing photographs of Major Marcel posing with pieces of it, or said to be from it.
In the modern era, Canadian nuclear physicist and ufologist Stanton T. Friedman is credited with breathing fresh life into the story of Roswell and firing up the idea that this was in fact one big cover-up.
And that was the introduction to the TV show.
Of course, on television, that had pictures.
Just before you email me about this, Stanton T. Friedman, I know, was born in America.
I am not actually sure.
Maybe you can tell me whether he ever took up Canadian citizenship.
But he certainly lived his later years and was very proud of being in New Brunswick, Canada, where I phoned him up and spoke with him many times.
And you know something?
The telephone connection, I guess he had an old-fashioned landline, was always utterly, absolutely brilliant.
And you can find podcasts with Stanton T. Friedman on my website, theunexplained.tv, going back years.
One of them is an edition in 2012 that is particularly interesting where he talks about Roswell.
Stanton T. Friedman, of course, the man who breathed new life into the entire story of Roswell, 1947, and he will be much missed for his humor, his ability, and his all-round grasp of the subject.
You know, most people that you speak with on this subject reference back in some form to Stanton T. Friedman.
Truly a great man.
Now, what I want you to hear now is something that we did that I don't think the others did across this anniversary.
I got together Jesse Marcel III and Jesse's sister Denise in different parts of the United Kingdom to talk about their grandfather and indeed their father and his vital role in the events at Roswell.
So here's that conversation from the TV show first.
One way to tackle this, I thought, was to talk to people directly related to him.
And on my podcast a few years ago, I had a man called Jesse Marcel III, the grandson of Jesse Marcel.
Tonight we've got him and we've also got his sister Denise Marcel, both of their lives enormously affected by those events 75 years ago.
So it's my great pleasure here in London to say to both Jesse Marcel III and Denise Marcel, thank you very much both for coming on The Unexplained.
Hi, thank you for having us.
And Denise, I know that you're in California.
Jesse, where are you?
I'm in Roswell, New Mexico.
Wow.
Okay.
And listen, I'll promise to come back to you in seconds, Denise.
But Jesse, what's it like?
What's the vibe there today?
You know, it's a very, very positive vibe.
It's kind of an interesting thing.
You know, everything was kind of shut down from COVID.
And this is kind of starting to, you know, start, things are starting to move again here and that sort of thing.
And one of the things that brought me to Roswell, actually, was that they put a star on the sidewalk.
Really?
They're calling it the Walk of Fame, kind of like Hollywood and that kind of thing.
And they wanted to dedicate basically a star to both Stanton Friedman and Ian Denise's grandfather.
So it was a really nice thing.
It was kind of a last-minute thing.
They asked us to come down and just kind of made a little appearance down here.
So it was a lot of fun.
I did love the same thing.
It was a wonderful thing.
It was, like I said, the vibe is typical Roswell.
Small town, very friendly.
A lot of people know a lot about the incident.
Some people know nothing about it.
And some people here just learn a little bit about it.
So you get a nice cross-section of everywhere you can Imagine from I had a good conversation with somebody from Turkey and then from Peru and then from Washington, D.C. So just all over the place.
It's not just the big names of ufology, as they call it.
It's a lot of ordinary people who felt, and I don't know whether pilgrimage is the right word, but they felt that they've had to make a pilgrimage to this place because 75 years anniversary of this thing.
And finally, we are hearing more about it.
We're coming to understand maybe what this incident was about.
And I know that on a personal level at Denise in California, this is something that absolutely molded itself and shaped your life.
Oh, 100%.
I mean, I don't remember an age actually when we didn't believe that there was life outside of what we know today.
We didn't have the internet then or anything like that.
So what we were exposed to were just what our father and grandfather told us about what they experienced.
So we had no outside influence.
And that right there is one reason why I 100% believe that what my grandfather found out there wasn't from here.
It was from somewhere else.
They couldn't identify it.
And I just want to make sure that everybody knows that he was telling the truth.
Obviously, I mean, we all have our, you know, our three score years and 10 or whatever it is, that he's not here today to hear the way that we talk about these things now.
Because Jesse, your granddad, had to, and he must have had tremendous intestinal fortitude to do it.
He had to undergo a lot of ridicule, a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of stuff.
And that's correct.
And also, if you think about, he had a very deep involvement in the Second World War.
So he was put through a lot of trials, tribulations.
I mean, the things he had to deal with as the head of intelligence on the nuclear bombing group here in the United States, he was involved in a lot of things that directly affected the outcome of the Second World War.
And that weighed heavily on him.
And perhaps dealing with the stress and the pressures of that made him more able to cope with the pressures of what happened in Roswell.
Although later in his life, I think it was more like he felt he was lucky to be part of it.
He thought, boy, of all the people here on Earth, I was the one or one of the people that went out there.
And I always like it when he met with Ayananis' father when our father was 12 years old.
He said, you know, look at these parts, some stuff he brought home to show him on the way back to the base.
And he said, these might be parts of a flying saucer.
And our dad's response was, what's a flying saucer?
Anyway, it was kind of a beginning.
It was just an amazing experience for, obviously, the grandfather, father, I, Denise, and our brother John and the rest of it.
This is really becoming kind of a legacy, but this legacy is growing as our families grow.
And putting this star on the sidewalk is like a line in the sand.
Now it's a permanent thing.
Anybody can come through and see it.
And you're right, this pilgrimage, that's a perfect way to put it.
Denise, in California, let's get back to you.
Let's ask this.
The material that it is claimed was recovered.
Now, subsequently, the U.S. military put out a statement saying this was a weather balloon.
In fact, they called up a guy who was a specialist on meteorological devices, I think, within the U.S. military.
They phoned him up and they said, get your ass down here.
So, you know, they made the story that this was a weather balloon and the world came to understand that whatever was reported before, this wasn't anything unusual.
This was a weather balloon.
Talk to me about your dad.
Of course, his father came home, Jesse came home with some of this material and talked about it.
So through the family over the years, what stories of the material have been told?
What do you know of that material?
Well, there were three main ones that he, pieces that he saw when he was in their kitchen.
One was something he called bake-a-light.
It almost looked like what a record would look like, that kind of like color, maybe kind of like that kind of plasticky feeling.
But so there was that.
And then there was the foil-like material, which he never crumpled it up to see if it did that whole, you crumple it up and flat out, you know, just go flat by itself.
He didn't try that.
He did say, though, his impression of it was that if he were to have a piece of it in his hand and he were to drop it, it would kind of float down like a feather because it was just so, so light.
And then the third thing that he really, just really always focused on was the I-beam, which he said that had the symbols on it.
He said that he could remember he held it up to the light.
He could see purple writing on it.
And the one that he could remember the clearest was something that looked like a seal bouncing a ball on its nose.
That's how he remembered it as an 11-year-old child.
So those are the three pieces that he really talked about.
So yeah, that's it.
And were they all at the end of it all, were they all confiscated?
They were taken away.
Nobody was allowed to keep anything?
No.
No, nobody kept anything.
I mean, I don't know.
I can't say.
Here's my suspicion.
I always wondered if Sharon Havitt could have kept the peace because he went out to the field with my grandfather.
He went back to the base by himself.
He denied everything.
He could have easily kept the peace.
Just saying.
And we're not all halfway.
I think that Blanchard kept the peace.
You know, there's different stories.
They get handed down of where parts might be.
And, you know, of course, just like the rest of the world, we're out there trying to investigate ourselves and trying to find where one of these pieces might have ended up.
Where do you think?
They're out there somewhere.
Well, exactly.
That's what I was going to ask.
Where do you think the bulk of this material, and there are people who say that they transported that enlisted men within the military who say that they were brought in to transport not only the material, but also bodies Of potential aliens.
Where do you think all of this stuff went?
You know, supposedly it went to.
Oh, I was going to say Wright-Patterson was what we were told.
You know, it would have, like anything else, I think it would have ended up in a lot, you know, in several laboratories studying the materials and what they represent, you know, the composition, that kind of thing.
You know, I would have to think that, you know, Wright-Patterson was kind of the beginning of where it got separated.
Obviously, there's numerous stories about it ended up, and somebody did some studies this way and that way.
I think our father said that even with our best technology, it'd be like giving a cell phone to a caveman.
That it's very, whatever this was was really advanced where we're at.
So it's interesting.
But I think that we have learned from it.
And one of those things, and maybe it's not precisely what the material was or what it was made of, but the idea that this was something that was made somewhere else.
And it opened the mind and the consciousness of a humanity and just opened that idea of what is possible.
So I think it had as much or more of an impact in that area as actually what it was.
And you work now, I know, in the business of designing futuristic cars.
Strange question, but based on the material and what we think we might know about this material, do you have a feeling in your gut, either Jesse, you or Denise, in your gut that this material, as has been claimed for so many years, might be being back engineered gradually and filtered back through huge corporations in the United States into things like microchips and a lot of stuff that seem to be remarkable leaps that happen very quickly through our history and might,
and we have to say might because we don't know, might trace their origins back to somewhere that's not here.
I'll find the answer to that one.
How could they not be?
I mean, how could they not have this material that was capable of whatever it was, dimensionally, whatever, however, got here, however they traversed the universe, traversed the space, that we wouldn't learn something from it?
It's very interesting.
Like you're talking about the material itself, really lightweight.
Our grandfather explained, it's almost like feather-like, but yet incredibly strong.
Certain properties, certain things we find out, like explaining about this material, it had a certain elasticity to it.
Same kind of thing we find in most advanced golf club heads now.
Kind of funny, but mylar, these different things, if it wasn't precisely gained from material, I think it was learned that you can create a material like this, and we did.
So I can't in the first my imagination say that we have not reverse engineered or conceived because of this material and we've created our own versions of it, maybe directly or indirectly.
But so yes, I wholeheartedly believe there is properties of reverse engineering involved.
And Denise, you know, Jesse Marcel, as we said, had to go through an awful lot because he was part of this.
But he was also required, if we go with the narrative, to go along with, because that was his duty.
And he was a man who was absolutely schooled in doing his duty.
He had to go along with the official narrative.
This was a weather balloon, nothing to see here.
As far as you know, both from your grandfather and your dad, because, you know, let's not forget this familial connection, how did that affect him?
How did that affect Jesse and Jesse's son to have to do something that later, all right, in a conversation with Stanton Friedman decades later, you know, he was able to move a little further forward and say, actually, this was, in my view, not from here.
But how did that affect him?
Well, you know, it's funny.
A couple of years ago, I reached out to some very, very close family members of my grandfather.
In fact, they were so close, they even got his piano.
She was a nurse, and she's the one that actually had found him when my grandfather had passed away.
And she told me at that point, the Roswell affected him a lot more than what people really knew.
So as much as I know he was, I'm sure he was the right person at the right time for all of this, but I think it did start to take a toll on him.
I think he found it really hard to believe that somebody couldn't believe that he wasn't telling the truth.
And that, I mean, they forced him in.
They didn't force him.
He went along with it.
He was doing his job as, you know, a dutiful military person should.
But I think after years and years of carrying it around, this feeling inside of him, it affected him a lot more than, and honestly, I don't even know if my father knew how much it affected him after talking to some of these family members.
It was, I found it quite upsetting, to be honest with you.
And so that's one of these reasons why I hope nobody ever forgets Roswell, because it did have impacts on people's lives a lot more than what people probably realize.
And we don't have a choice in the matter.
We have to go along with what our government says, what it's putting out.
But I'm personally, I'm just saying it's time, enough of this cover-up.
It's time to let the story out and tell us exactly what happened.
Denise, you've been involved in MUFON, haven't you?
I know.
Has anybody asked you to give evidence to one of these hearings, these Washington hearings?
You know, I kind of feel they should.
Well, Jesse and I actually did the citizen hearing in 2013 together.
We did do that.
As far as doing any other speaking engagements for something like that, a hearing, no, I have not been approached for something like that.
Okay.
And the one thing that I haven't heard, and maybe I just haven't been looking in the right places, I haven't heard either of you talk about.
And maybe Jesse, you can fill me in on this.
You know, the reports of bodies, there were reports of four bodies of small alien-like creatures with strange skin.
Well, various accounts of their eyes and whatever costume they might have been wearing to protect themselves.
You know, various reports of enlisted men being given the task of driving something back somewhere under a tarpaulin.
The recollections of your granddad, did they speak to that at all?
If I could give a little bit of backstory, my grandfather always did remain a little protective when it came to his family because, you know, part of his opinion, but I think part of it's not, where he wanted to tell us things, but he also didn't want to put us in a position of scrutiny by our own government and that sort of thing.
And he spoke of it in almost a third person.
I remember the conversations where he's talking about, you know, the second crash site with the bodies.
He knew the people involved that described the situation that used it.
And he told us that you can believe what they said.
So that's kind of the closest connection we have through our grandfather and that he said that those people were telling the truth in what they're talking about, that second crash site.
That second crash site involved a bigger piece of the craft and the bodies.
And you must have thought both of you, really, Denise.
If all of this is so, you must have pondered all of your lives as you both go through those lives.
How would it be possible to keep a secret that big?
How do you think that has been possible?
Probably a lot of money.
I think a lot of money probably is involved to help probably cover part of this up.
Well, I'm sure that's what's happened.
It's probably been like my brother said, split up in a lot of corporations.
And when, you know what, you have to just follow the money at the end of the day.
I think that will probably help lead you to wherever all of this goes.
I mean, it has been covered up 75 years.
My gosh, it's such a long time to be covering something like this.
I don't know how you can find where it's gone now because I don't think a lot of people in our government probably do know what happened with it.
There's probably very few.
Because it's all done in a compartmentalized need-to-know way, yeah?
Exactly.
It's a great privilege and pleasure on this day to speak with both of you.
Jesse, you told me a lovely story on a podcast a few years ago, and I wonder if you could just briefly tell it now for the TV audience about an encounter you had with your granddad when you were out fishing.
Do you remember that?
And he kind of told you something about what he'd experienced.
Have I got that right?
It was my grandfather.
Obviously, our whole family is down in Louisiana when we did a lot of fishing and stuff by the house.
And I apologize, I can't remember the specific story, but we did enjoy in a very casual family sense in talking about what happened and where, you know, like I said, we talked about Roswell as much as we talked about his personal life.
And again, there are a lot about the man, you know, what he had to deal with through the Second World War and the great weight he felt on his shoulders for his part of that.
And then when Tander Roswell, I do, I'm not dismissing anything my sister is saying about the great pressures he felt, but I have this idea that, you know, as it was, there was a lot of pressure on him, but he also felt like he was the right person for that job.
And that he, and that, you know, it was a struggle as it was with my father.
I mean, I and my sister kind of live in a lucky world where, you know, people are actually are more embracing of this story.
And if we, you know, as far as in my dad's era, you know, if you spoke about it, the media attacked you.
Everybody attacked you.
You're just crazy.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Now everybody wants to talk to you about it and it's positive about it.
So it's a different kind of world that we live in today, definitely, than back then.
It sure is.
I hope we get the chance to speak again, both of you.
Denise, you've been asked this one many times, if I'm sure you've heard all these questions before, but if you were to sum up your grandfather, right?
If you were to find words to sum him up, what would those words be?
Hero, courageous, truth-teller.
Thank you very much both.
In California, Denise, I hope we talk again.
And Jesse, nice to speak with you again.
I wish you all the very best.
And I hope you get this story out there in the way that it deserves across this anniversary.
Thank you both.
That's Jesse Marcel.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Jesse Marcel III and that is Denise Marcel, the grandchildren of Jesse Marcel here.
My grateful thanks to two lovely people, Jesse Marcel III and Denise.
I do hope that I will get the chance to speak with them again and perhaps without the limits of television time constraints that are always among us, as they say.
Kevin D. Randall is another remarkable person to appear on the show.
Kevin D. Randall has a U.S. military, Air Force background and has spent 37 years or thereabouts, certainly a very, very long time, investigating intensively and interviewing on the Roswell case.
He's written a number of books about it, but his latest, I think, is utterly outstanding.
And I think it is one of the most comprehensive I've ever seen on any subject.
The amount of research, the amount of detail, the interviews, you don't find those anywhere else.
The book is called Understanding Roswell, and it's one of Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press books.
And I was very delighted on the TV show, the 75th Anniversary Roswell Show, to get Kevin D. Randall to talk about his research and that book.
Okay, let's get to this.
This weekend, 75 years ago, farmer Mac Brazil was talking to friends and his family about strange debris that he found on his land.
He took some of that to the local sheriff, and then it went to the local military, and that's how the case of Roswell and whatever happened and was discovered came about.
Kevin D. Randall, Captain USA Air Force, is the author of Project Moondust, Conspiracy of Silence, a History of UFO Crashes and co-author of UFO Crash at Roswell and the Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell.
A captain in the United States Air Force Reserve, he is considered the foremost expert on the Roswell incident and is well known as a serious researcher of extraterrestrial phenomena.
He's right up our street, I would say.
Captain Randall makes his home in Iowa, and we're going to connect with him right now.
Kevin, thank you for coming on.
Well, thank you so much for having me, but I retired from the military and I retired as a lieutenant colonel.
So I moved up the chain.
Well, that's what I get.
That's online biographies for you, Kevin.
Nice to talk with you again.
Your book has had some fantastic reviews, and I can quite understand why.
I went through it yesterday, and this is a complicated case, and everybody's got their two cents to put in about it.
But there is so much detail in this book.
I don't even know how you began.
I mean, I know that you've been working on Roswell as a subject, but your new book, Understanding Roswell, that I think was out about eight weeks ago, there is so much detail in there.
I just don't know how you did it.
It was 30 years of research or 35 years worth of research, talking to an awful lot of people.
And then once I'd done all of that, and I have to, you know, I worked with Don Schmidt quite a bit on this and Tom Carey as well, putting the material together.
But I went back and I looked at it as a cold case, trying to figure out where we'd gone wrong and where we'd gone right and put it all together in a compendium that looks at the case from the point of view of this is the fact as opposed to this is exciting things or this is some of the more sensational claims of the Roswell case.
I wanted to boil it down to here's what we can prove and here's what we really know as opposed to here's what we speculate and here's what you'd like to think and take it in those directions.
37 years of research.
What was it about this case?
Just like Stanton T. Friedman, there was something about it that grabbed him.
What grabbed you?
In the beginning, not much of anything, because when Don Schmidt approached me from the Center of U.S. Studies to assist in the investigation, they wanted somebody with a military background because many of the witnesses had military backgrounds and thought I would be able to bond with them better than somebody from the civilian world.
I thought we'd get down to Roswell and we'd spend two or three days down there and we'd come up with the solution as often happens with some of these cases.
As we were leaving New Mexico, I said to Don, you know, there's an awful lot we don't know and we have to get back here and talk about it.
The pivotal point was talking to Bill Brazil, the son of the man who'd found the debris and learning what he had to say and what his experiences were.
And that kind of turned around the whole thing, realizing that the balloon explanations that had been offered by the military just didn't make any sense.
And once we got deeper into the case, we realized it was going in a direction we didn't expect and that here was an opportunity to understand how the military, the United States military and the United States government treated the flying saucers at the time, now UFOs, now UAPs, I guess, and what they were doing.
So it kind of grew on me in that respect because of the historical nature of it and the evidence and the testimony we were getting from the people who were directly involved.
There is a bit of a dichotomy.
There's a bit of opposition in the accounts of Bill Brazel and the daughter, isn't there?
They don't agree.
No, they do now, or they did.
I think they've both passed away since then.
But in the beginning, Bessie Brazil suggested that they picked up pieces of a balloon, and Bill Brazell said, no, it wasn't that at all.
They did pick up pieces of balloons later on or at other times.
And I think that's where the confusion came in with Bessie Brazil.
But once she sat down with her brother Bill and they discussed it, she realized that she'd made a mistake about all of that.
And things that she was saying just didn't track with the evidence that we've been able to develop.
For example, she said, well, we accompanied my father into Roswell.
And we played in a park while he was at the sheriff's office, but nobody came back with him that night.
I'm thinking, well, Jesse Marcel and Sheridan Cabinet certainly did.
And so some of the things that she said just didn't track.
One of the other things she said was that her father hadn't gone back to Roswell in the couple of days afterwards.
And we knew that he had gone back to Roswell.
He was interviewed at the Roswell Daily Record.
He was interviewed by Frank Joyce.
He was stayed, stayed.
He was kept out at the base at Roswell.
And Edwin Easley, who was a provost marshal at the base, told me that, that Razwell had been kept in the guardhouse.
Not the guardhouse, but the guest.
Now, that's a very interesting point.
And I hadn't read any detail about that before.
I mean, there is a little bit of discrepancy in various accounts, isn't there?
Of, you know, he went into Roswell and talked to the sheriff and all the rest of it.
And then the military got interested.
There's a great account in the book of somebody going into town and seeing Mac Brazil surrounded by six military personnel, and they were almost marching him past.
So something was going on, it appears.
Well, clearly it was something very important had happened.
I mean, everybody agrees something fell at Roswell.
Something very important fell at Roswell.
The skeptical community would tell, well, it was this Project Mogul balloon that was classified top secret.
They were doing these top secret experiments in New Mexico, but it turns out that's not true.
The ultimate purpose was classified, but what was going on in New Mexico was not.
And what they were dealing with was just regular weather balloons.
And what I discovered, and I point out in the book, something that nobody else has really talked about.
The illustration used for the Project Mogul arrays is from flight number two, which took place on the east coast of the United States, and it had Raywind targets on it.
When they moved to New Mexico and you look at the illustrations and the diagrams of the arrays, you find out there's no raywind targets on any of them.
So the first flights in New Mexico up through until, I think, July, had no Raywind targets.
And if there were no Raywind targets, then the metallic debris that the military has pointed to, the government's pointed to as being what they found, didn't exist because there was nothing there.
And had it been a balloon, these arrays on the East Coast had been like six feet, 600 feet long.
By the time they got to New Mexico, they'd reduced them to 400 feet.
And it would have taken Brazil maybe 30 minutes to pick the whole thing up on the ranch.
And that doesn't match with the descriptions given by Jesse Marcel and other people who saw the debris field.
It doesn't match with anything that we were able to learn and to verify.
So we eliminate the Project Mobile explanation.
We have Brazil being accompanied around the town of Roswell to give his story.
And what nobody else had really talked about either is that they brought debris into the sheriff's office.
When Brazil went to the sheriff's office in the Beginning, he took debris into the sheriff's office.
Phyllis Maguire, who was the sheriff's daughter, was there at the time.
The sheriff's office, the sheriff's house, the sheriff's quarters were above the jail, so they lived above the jail.
So she was there when Brazil brought in the debris, and that debris was sent immediately onto Fort Worth.
And Colonel Thomas DeBose talked about how it was a package and sent on to Washington.
Had it been what would have been basically the envelope of a balloon and some twine or string that connected the things together, they would have said, that's a balloon.
You know, what are we doing?
Well, I mean, this is the top and bottom of it, isn't it, Kevin?
The basic fact of all of this is if this was something that was innocuous and the story changed from the initial release, as we know, that said Flying Saucer recovered to weather balloon and poor Jesse Marcel having to pose with pieces of a weather balloon that may or may not have been what was actually recovered, and that's what we've been debating all these years.
But if there was nothing much going on, then why were the military brass, as they say, so stirred up about it?
And that's the question.
That's the very good question.
Had it been, even if it had been, if Project Mogul had been classified top secret, what they were doing in New Mexico, it wouldn't have caused the response of the military in Roswell because those balloons were being launched in Alamogordo, some 112, 120 miles away.
But it's the response of the military to this that is very interesting.
And Brazil being held, I think it's four to six days in Roswell to give the Kakamami story that what he found was some kind of balloon.
But he says in the interview that was conducted on Wednesday, I think July 9th, he said, I found weather observation devices on two other occasions, and this was nothing like those.
Well, that's interesting.
Is it, don't you say in the book, unless I misread it and I did read it at speed, that Mac Brasle, wasn't he interviewed by a local radio station twice?
And, you know, it was before the days of tape recorders, so they had to do it on a wire recorder, which is a fascinating thought in itself.
And the first time he told the story that this was all very peculiar, and the second time he was more on the weather balloon side, or have I got that wrong?
No, you've got that right.
The second time he went and talked to Frank Joyce, he was talking about the weather balloon.
But he was interviewed by the station owner, the majority station owner in Roswell, Walt Whitmore, and by the minority station owner, Judd Roberts.
And Judd Roberts was talking about the wire recorder, and it took the interview lasted an hour, and it took him an hour to rewind the wire.
But they never aired it because they got a call from Washington, D.C. that says, you know, if you air that interview, you better start looking for another job because you won't be in the radio business.
Where are those recordings?
The recording was the recording is gone.
I would imagine once they got that kind of a response from the congressional, the New Mexico congressional representatives that they would have destroyed the recording.
That recording has never surfaced.
Frank Joyce talked about, and he was the announcer and a reporter for the radio station that they had come through, the military had come through and swept the office looking for anything that had to do with this event.
And he had hidden away some of the paper so that he retained that teletype materials all these years.
And it's been published in a number of books.
But the point simply is that the military had come through and they've been looking for those sort of things.
And had that wire recording not been destroyed, I'm sure they would have taken it.
You talk about the military's response and the word that you use about it is panic.
It was a disorganization, it seems to be disorganized panic and chaos, all of it.
They were responding to something that they're not prepared for.
I think what they did, and if I was the commanding officer, I'd have done this.
There would have been a contingency plan.
If we inadvertently drop an atomic bomb somewhere, it's not supposed to be dropped, or even a mock-up of one, because the size and shape of the atomic bombs in 1947 was classified.
And they would practice with these sort of things to make sure that they were able to do it.
They wouldn't practice with the real thing.
But if that had been the problem, there would have been a response, but not this Herculean response that you see.
And had that been the explanation when the Air Force investigated again in 1995, they would have said, you know, we found the documentation.
Here it is.
But what happened was they dropped a mock-up of an atomic bomb when we were trying to prevent the Soviet Union from learning of what the size and shape, what they looked like.
And that would have been a perfect explanation.
And we'd have all said, okay, that makes some sense to us.
But they didn't, but they come up with this stupid balloon explanation instead.
So their response makes no sense in the context of how they responded to it, what they did, how they went out and they picked up everything.
They swept the ground looking for the smallest pieces and the flights in and out of Roswell and the number of people involved in that sort of thing.
Every member of Colonel Blanchard's staff, he being the commanding officer of Roswell at the time, every member of his staff that we were able to interview with one exception told us was something alien, something extraterrestrial.
What about his boss, Raimi?
I think Raimi was well aware of what was going on as well.
And I think once word got out, and I'm still confused by Blanchard issuing the press release, but once the word got out, Raimi was now controlling the situation or was being controlled in Washington, D.C. by the Strategic Air Command and probably the chief of staff of the Army at the time.
But once that information got out, then Raimi becomes involved.
And Raimi is a higher headquarters.
So he has more authority, obviously more authority than Blanchard, but he has more credibility than Blanchard because it's a higher headquarters.
So the lower headquarters says, well, we got a flying saucer.
And the higher headquarters says, no, no, they made a mistake.
It's a weather balloon.
And here's the weather balloon.
But they even called in, didn't they?
I love the account in the book of them calling up the weather balloon expert.
And they basically said to the weather balloon expert, get your ass down here now.
Yeah, I always kind of laughed at that because, and talking to Irvin Newton, who was the weather officer, I talked to him a couple of times and have some letters from him.
And he always kind of laughed at that.
He said, well, Raimi called him, or maybe his aide called him and says, you need to come up here.
And Newton says, I'm sorry, I'm the only guy here.
I can't leave.
And Raimi comes on the phone and says, you know, get your ass up here and take the first car you find in with the keys if you don't have your own car and get up here.
And then when he arrived, he was briefed.
He says, you know, the general thinks this was a weather balloon.
He wants you to identify it.
So he goes in there and what he sees is, in fact, a weather balloon and Raywood target.
So he identified exactly what he'd seen in there.
But it was not the stuff that Marcel brought from Roswell because Marcel himself said, that's not the stuff I bought when he saw the pictures.
And Thomas DuBose, who was the chief of staff of the Eighth Air Force, said that the stuff in the office at that point was not the stuff that had come from Roswell.
It had been switched.
So we know it had been switched based on the testimony of people who were in the office.
Indeed.
And poor Jesse Marcel, he's the man that I always feel for.
And we had his grandchildren on this show an hour ago.
And he was the guy that if you believe, if you buy into the idea that what was found there was anomalous, then Jesse Marcel was the guy who was put there to sell a lie.
Well, that was his job.
And I think as an intelligence officer, and I speak as that because I was an intelligence officer myself in the Air Force, and I know that there are times when security requires you to not tell the truth.
I got a call one day when I was at Richard Skabauer Air Force Base from a reporter from the Kansas City Star.
And he had information that I got from classified sources, some kind of an event taken place, and he was trying to verify it.
And he wanted me to tell, he wanted me to say, yeah, that's true.
I couldn't do that because I learned it from classified sources.
So I had to lie to the guy.
So I don't know what you're talking about.
And he was berating me for being a crummy intelligence officer.
I'm thinking, I'm doing pretty good here.
I've got you fooled.
But I mean, the point simply is in the military, there are times that security kind of trumps the truth.
And you have to do your job.
You can think of all kinds of events in which that happened.
And this is one of those where he was required to, he really didn't say much in Raimi's office, however.
That's the other thing.
He would say, he said later that he just wasn't talking about what he had seen.
And that sort of thing.
Irving Newton said, well, he was lifting up pieces about and says, could this be something or could this be something?
But according to what Marcel had said to others and what Du Bose had said, Marcel wasn't really allowed to say much of anything.
He was just posed with the debris, and that was the end of his experience in the office.
Everything then transferred to Raimi talking about what had transpired.
Now, we're going to talk in the next segment of our conversation, Kevin, and thank you for doing this across this weekend because I know it's a big weekend for all of this.
We're going to talk about some of the accounts and interviews that you include in the book.
But I wonder if we've got time, just before we take those commercials, to quickly talk about a man who's very important in this story, Walter Hout, who was the base PR man and somebody else, and critically and crucially, who over the decades changed his story.
Well, Walter Hout originally was, I just wrote the press release.
And then there was a question of whether he actually wrote the press release or Colonel Blanchard gave him, dictated him over the phone what it was supposed to be, or someone in his office wrote the actual press release that was handed out based on the information provided.
But that was his story for literally decades.
I just wrote the press release, and then he began to talk about how, well, he had been more deeply involved and seen a lot more than had been originally talked about.
In fact, I talked to a guy named Richard Harris, who was a finance officer in Roswell in 1947.
And he told me long before Walter Haatt talked about seeing the bodies, he told me that Walter Hott had said to him one day, they were in the hangar where the bodies were stored.
And Haut said, you want to see what's on the other side of the hangar, on the other side of the door, just open the door.
And Harris said he just really didn't want to see the dead bodies.
So he just didn't open the door.
But that came out prior to Walter Haatt saying anything about having seen the bodies.
And that was kind of an interesting thing that was told to me by the guy.
And then later Walter Haatt kind of confirmed the story when I said, well, yeah, I've been more deeply involved.
And Walter Happen crucially wrote an affidavit almost on his deathbed in 1993, didn't he?
He talked to, I think Don Schmidt actually wrote the affidavit, which is no problem.
It was based on the testimony and the information that Walter Haught was giving him.
So he was there in the room and writing down what Haut wanted to say and kind of clarifying things.
And his daughter, Julie, was there as well at the time.
So yes, there was an affidavit that was published after Walter Haught passed away talking about his more deeper involvement in the case.
Well, indeed, you actually outline all of the 10 points in that affidavit.
And point nine is, I am convinced that the material recovered, quote, was some type of craft from outer space.
Point 10 is, I have not been paid nor given anything of value to make this statement.
I think that's kind of a catch-all for affidavits when you're doing that thing, that you're saying, well, I'm not being paid to give this affidavit.
But he did sign the affidavit.
But he signed an earlier affidavit that said, basically, all I did was write the press release.
And so we've got that discrepancy there.
And then how do we fold that into the entire Roswell story?
Was Walter Haught living up to the code that he wasn't supposed to talk about this sort of thing and refused to kind of break that oath while he was still alive and provided this information for us after he had passed away?
Interesting.
We'll talk some more in just moments here on the 75th anniversary of Roswell.
Kevin D. Randall wrote Understanding Roswell, a great book that's just out.
We're going to talk about some of the fascinating accounts of some of the people who may have been involved in transporting material and bodies from the Roswell crash site In 1947.
Did something from beyond this planet fall to Earth in that vast area of New Mexico?
And were there bodies of aliens or something?
And were those bodies and that material from the crash transported somewhere by a bunch of people who were doing their duty, enlisted people in many cases, who simply couldn't tell their story until perhaps a lot later?
Kevin D. Randall wrote the book Understanding Roswell.
It's just out.
And it's, for my money, it's a great, great account.
There is so much work in this book, 37 years of work.
Let's get back to Kevin D. Randall.
So Kevin, what I'd like to do, if this is okay with you, and tell me if I got this wrong, is focus in on those accounts that you carry in the book, of those people who say that they were part of this, and in later life they were happy to maybe change their story, maybe be a little more fulsome about it.
You've got so many of those accounts.
One of them is Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett, who talked of a light material, I'm just quoting here from the book, a light material that could not be bent.
I mean, that's just one account.
Well, Rickett is important because he was the counterintelligence NCOIC, the sergeant in charge of the counterintelligence office.
So he worked directly under Sheridan Cabot.
Cabot saying, well, no, I never picked up any balloons.
And then he said, well, yeah, I picked up balloons.
And Roswell was only a balloon.
So Rickett's account is very important.
And the only time I ever saw Cabot get annoyed or get nervous, Don and I had visited him in Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he and his wife were wintering.
And while Don was talking to Mary Cabot, I was talking to Sheridan Cabot.
We got to talking about the bodies and that sort of thing.
And Cavot got very nervous when I asked the question.
Then he picked up a magazine off the coffee table and he sat back and then he leaned forward and threw it down.
And he says, Bill Rickett tell you that?
And actually, Bill Rickett had told me that, but I said, no, I gave him another name and he relaxed immediately.
I didn't want to get Rickett into trouble, but later on, we got copies of letters that Rickett and Cavett had exchanged about this event.
Don got them from Lewis Rickett, and it kind of confirmed part of that information about there being a craft and body.
So when Cavett was talking to the Air Force and saying, no, I just went out and picked up pieces of a weather balloon.
And in fact, Cavett had told me at one point, because I'd asked him about that.
And he said, no, we were too busy to bother with any recovery of balloons.
And then, of course, he's telling Colonel Weaver, who was the Air Force investigator in the mid-1990s, that, yeah, he was out there with Brazil and all he saw were the remnants of a weather balloon.
So Rickett is very important in that respect.
And Rickett talks about how he was taken out to the site.
And I guess Easley was there as well, according to what Rickett was saying.
And there was debris laying around.
He reached down to pick up a piece of debris, which was very, very lightweight.
He said it looked like cold-rolled steel, which is very strong.
And he was trying to bend it because it was so thin and he couldn't do that.
He couldn't get it bent.
And they were kind of laughing at him about trying to do what they had been unable to do.
So we've got some good information from Lewis Rickett about what he had seen on the debris field when he was out there with Cavett and Easley and some of the other military personnel.
And you quote Easley, I think this is a correct quote from the book.
He was interviewed first in 1990.
And I think he said, I can't talk about it, which is different from, I won't talk about it.
I can't talk about it.
It's a very specific thing.
But he said, we think that it was extraterrestrial.
I think that's what he said.
And he said, let me put it this way.
It's not the wrong path.
In other words, if you suggest that it is extraterrestrial, you're not on the wrong path.
I think that was the way that that conversation went.
In talking to Easley, and I think I'm the only one ever talked to him about this.
And I was kind of taken aback because we'd had some good luck with the earlier witnesses telling us what we wanted to know, answering our questions.
And I asked him a question about it.
I said, well, I can't tell you about that.
I can't talk about it.
And a number of times he would tell me, I can't talk about it.
I sworn to secrecy.
Well, in a later conversation I was having with him, I asked him, I said, are we following the right path?
And he said, what do you mean?
And I said, well, we think it was extraterrestrial.
And he said, well, let me put it this way.
It's not the wrong path.
In essence, telling us it was extraterrestrial.
So he confirmed that it was extraterrestrial.
Easley also talked to family members before he died of cancer in the early 1990s.
And one point he said something about, oh, the creatures.
So he was there.
He was involved in securing the area.
As a provost marshal, his job would have been security.
He would have overseen the security on the crash site, the debris field, the impact point where the bodies were found, and what was going on in the base.
His job was security.
So he was directly involved in all of that maneuvering back in 1947, as would be the operations officer and the executive officer and the deputy commander.
All these people would have been directly involved in some aspect of this.
And we talked, like I said, we talked to all of them who were alive at the time we began our investigation.
Some of them, surprisingly, died not long after that, which is not to suggest any kind of nefarious connection there.
It was just, you know, I think it was Patrick, I'm sorry, Payne Jennings was involved in testing a weapon during the Korean War that exploded prematurely and killed him and everybody in his aircraft and that sort of thing.
So it wasn't anything nefarious.
Well, everyone that we were able to identify and talk to told us that it was something extraterrestrial.
Patrick Saunders was the base adjutant.
He was responsible for moving things around.
He was very proud about how they covered up the expenses.
In the military, like everything else, you have to account for all the money you spend.
And you can't say, well, I flew alien bodies to Wright Field in July of 1947.
However, what you can do is we had a navigation problem for our air crews to fly from Roswell to Wright Field as a navigational problem.
And so you can load the aircraft with whatever you want on that point.
You've covered the moving of the material to Wright field in a very innocuous way, saying, Well, it was just a navigation problem, and everybody is happy with that.
And Saunders told us that records had been changed and serial numbers had been changed and things like that.
In the frontislef of the book that Don and I had written originally, UFO Crash at Roswell, there was a fly leaf that just came, gave a little bit of information.
It said top secret, and all this stuff is laid out.
And Saunders read the book, and I've got a copy of the fly leaf.
He Xeroxed it, and he had written on it, this is the truth, and I never told anybody and signed his name.
And so we've got a document, of course, created some 35, 40 years after the event, where he's saying, yeah, I was involved in this, and this is what I know.
And it's all signed and dated there.
We've only got a few minutes left, sadly, and that's always the problem with these shows.
And again, I thank you for doing this.
A lot of people contacting me tonight are interested in the bodies, of course they are, and the accounts of those people who say that they put bodies, perhaps four of them, of these strange, small, apparent aliens or whatever they were, under a tarpaulin on the back of a truck, and they took them away.
What do we know about that?
What do we think we know?
Part of that comes from a fellow named Melvin Brown.
He was a sergeant back in 1947.
I think he married an English lady and eventually moved to England.
But he talked about how he had been part of the security detail.
When you have an event like this and you need guards, you sweep through the base and you pick up everybody who's available for guards.
I mean, everybody in the army does basic training.
I mean, I went through basic training and you learned how to stand guard, you learned how to guard buildings and all this so that you could do these sorts of things.
And when something like this happened, you would pull all these people in and he was pulled in to help guard this.
And he was put in the back of the truck to guard this material that they were taking into Roswell.
And he was told not to look under the tarpaulin.
And of course, when you tell somebody like that, the first thing you're going to do when you turn your back, and so he looked.
The other guy with him just didn't want to take a look for some reason.
He told his daughters about this, Beverly Bean.
And I forget the other daughter's name, and he told his wife about that as well on a number of occasions.
I think when the men landed on the moon, he mentioned something to them.
And one of the daughters came home one day frightened by something, some kind of a UFO type sighting.
And he told her not to worry about it because nothing bad would happen.
They were friendly people, but he was involved in transporting the bodies from the impact site into Roswell and into the hangars.
Did one of the aliens live?
There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, that one actually lived for a time.
There are stories like that, and I'm just skeptical of those stories.
Given the nature of the evidence and the people who are talking about this, there are some stories like that.
I think they were probably all killed in the crash.
But there are stories like that.
And I talked to a guy who told me that he'd spent literally months with the alien creature before it passed away, learning about its home world and that sort of thing.
And I'm just not real comfortable with that story.
Fascinating story, though.
Just in a few seconds, if you can, Kevin, and this is a great book, Understanding Roswell Out Now, as they say.
Where do you think all of this material and those bodies perhaps frozen are now?
I think about that periodically.
I think there's probably a small group of people who are charged with keeping this thing under wraps and investigating it.
And as our technology advances, they apply that technology to whatever we picked up there.
But it's a very small group, not the large group we had back in 1947.
And I've often wondered about the bodies.
I know that General Ease, sorry, General Exxon told us that one of the bodies had been taken to Denver, Colorado.
At the time, that was the, the Army had its mortuary service there as a way of preserving the body because you have a unique biological sample and you don't want it destroyed there.
Kevin D. Randall, before that you heard Jesse Marcel III and Denise Marcel, and of course the introduction telling you the whole story of Roswell as far as we know it.
I'm sure that more will come out about this and whether these anniversary events lead to further disclosure or disclosure at all, I think is probably anybody's guess.
But your thoughts always welcome.
Thank you for being part of my show, My Worldwide Family.
If you want to send me an email, thank you.
You can email me through my website, theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam.
And if you have been expecting and asked for a reply to an email and you haven't had one, I think I'm up to date with the emails, but please let me know.
Drop me a reminder and I will deal with it, as they say.
Okay, I think that's just about it.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, in the summertime, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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