The Roswell Report
"...The Biggest Lie I Ever Had to Tell."
By Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt
On July 8, 1947, the U.S. Army announced to the world its capture of a flying saucer outside of Roswell, N.M.
Newspapers around the world carried the banner headline. Lt. Walter Haut, the public-information officer at Roswell Army Air Field, had a stack of phone messages on top of his desk more than six inches high.
According to the press release, Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, the chief intelligence officer at Roswell AAF, was ordered to report personally to his base commander's supervising officer at Carswell AAF in Fort Worth, Texas.
Within hours of inspecting the Roswell debris in his office at Fort Worth, Gen. Roger M. Ramey made a statement to the media identifying the wreckage as that of a weather balloon. [This photo depicts Ramey speaking on Roswell radio station KGFL at a later time.]
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SOURCE: UNIV. OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON LIBRARIES,
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIV.
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Being the chief intelligence officer of the most elite unit in the U.S. military at that time was no small accomplishment. The 509th Atomic Bomb Squadron was a composite group that comprised the best officers, pilots, technicians, doctors and nurses the Army could muster. It was a veteran unit of select personnel whose mission was to deliver the atomic bomb via air strike to Japan in 1945. Maj. Marcel was instrumental in the development and tactical operation of the 509th ABS, based at Roswell AAF. Consequently, when a local rancher by the name of W.W. "Mack" Brazel reported unidentifiable aircraft wreckage outside of town, it became Marcel's duty to identify the source of that wreckage.
On July 8, 1947, aboard a waiting B29 with its pilot crew, Maj. Marcel held a box of the recovered debris on his lap. A staff car pulled up to the aircraft, and Master Sgt. Robert Porter loaded four brown-paper-wrapped packages into the bomb bay of the aircraft. Porter noticed that each was of light weight; three of them were the size of a shoe box; and the fourth was triangular and approximately two-and-a-half feet in diameter.
The bomber crew's preflight instructions were to fly to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, and have the strange material analyzed by the Foreign Technology Division based there. (The FTD conducted much of the Army's reverse-engineering technology research on captured armory and weaponry during WWII.) Up to that point, no one had been able to identify the mangled remains found outside Roswell.
Shortly after departing Roswell AAF at 3PM MST/4PM CST on July 8, 1947, the B29 was ordered to make a preliminary stop at Fort Worth, which at that time was a one-hour flight away. Maj. Marcel reported directly to Gen. Roger M. Ramey there and gave him the box of Roswell material at roughly 5PM CST.
Ramey wanted to know exactly where it had been found. He invited the major to follow him into an adjoining map room.
Gen. Roger M. Ramey is believed by many to have been the chief architect of the Roswell cover-up.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION.
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Some moments passed before the two returned from the map room to the general's office, where Marcel immediately noticed that the box he had carried from Roswell AAF was no longer on top of the desk. As they stepped farther into the room, on the floor in front of the desk were the remains of a clean yet mangled radar kite of reflective foil, wooden sticks, masking tape and bailing twine. A clump of rotten Neoprene reeking of old rubber was all that remained of the balloon itself. Directly under this mess was a mass of unrolled, brown-paper wrapping.
Col. Thomas J. DuBose, Gen. Ramey's chief of staff at that time, later attested: "Actually it was a cover story. ... The balloon part of it ... the remnants [from Roswell] were taken from this location, and Al Clark (the base commander at Fort Worth) took [them] to Washington, [D.C.,] and whatever happened then, I have no knowledge. That part of it [the weather balloon] was, in fact, a story that we were told to give to the public and the news, and that was it."
The next few minutes in Gen. Ramey's office were strictly military procedure. Maj. Marcel was ordered by Ramey to pose with him next to the balloon-and-kite wreckage for two photos by a reporter named James Bond Johnson of the Fort Worth Star Telegram. No other news-media representatives were present.
One can only imagine what thoughts went through the mind of Maj. Marcel as he crouched down and lifted some of the substituted, foil material for the photographer. Marcel was fully aware that the 509th ABS at Roswell AAF launched that exact type of radar balloon twice each day from atop the tallest building in town. The balloons were used to detect upper-atmospheric wind direction and speed to assist the 509th in their test-drop exercises of the atomic bomb under their command. That was their military assignment at Roswell; they respected the bomb, loved their aircraft and knew their weather balloons.
Gen. Ramey ordered Maj. Marcel to spend the night at Fort Worth headquarters and to not say a word to anyone about the incident. Col. DuBose was told not to ever mention the subject again. Ramey also canceled the continuation of the B29 flight to Wright Field. All the excitement had been for nothing, he said, and newspaper headlines proclaimed the next morning, "It's a Weather Balloon."
Roughly one year later, Gen. Ramey and other officers were waiting on the tarmac at Carswell AFB for a taxiing B29. A technical sergeant, working nearby, overheard one of the officers ask Ramey about the Roswell events of the previous year. Ramey responded, "That was the biggest lie I ever had to tell." Another officer asked about the nature of the wreckage. Ramey replied that it was "out of this world."
but thanx for the tip jed
