When it comes to the issue of what really happened on what was once known as the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in early July 1947, there are things we know, things we suspect, and things we will probably never know. But, that something happened – something which caused the U.S. Air Force to offer multiple explanations for the event – is not a matter of any doubt at all. It was an incident that clearly concerned elements of not just the military, but the government, too, and to a highly significant degree. Eye-witnesses – both military and civilian – were warned not to talk about what they had seen and / or heard. More than a few of those warnings crossed the line and can only accurately be described as death threats. People were plunged into states of fear. Lives were changed forever; even scarred. Some lives may have ended; as in terminated.
It was on July 8, 1947 that the strange event surfaced publicly. Associated Press (among many other news outlets) reported on the startling, then-breaking news: “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chavez County. “The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”
The whole world was watching.
The story was quickly picked up, not just across the United States, but across the planet, too. In barely no time at all, however, the flying disc angle was blown out of the sky: the whole thing was nothing but a huge, embarrassing mistake. The materials found on the massive ranch – by rancher William Ware “Mack” Brazel – were not the remains of a disc, after all. What had really been found, and subsequently collected and brought to the Roswell Army Air Field, was weather-balloon debris. Or, so the military was careful to try and assure everyone. With Brazel at the time of the discovery – which had actually occurred days earlier – was a young boy named Dee Proctor. He would go on to be one of the most important people in the Roswell story. We also know for sure that three, key military men, all of whom were destined to become part and parcel of the Roswell affair, were also present at the ranch – and specifically before a veritable battalion was on-site and ordered to recover the massive amount of whatever-it-was. They were Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence-office of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell; Captain Sheridan Cavitt, of the Counter-Intelligence Corps; and CIC Master Sergeant Lewis S. “Bill” Rickett. All three were at ground-zero. They all saw the wreckage. Years later Marcel would open up wide on the matter of the debris he saw and collected. Cavitt and Rickett may have seen more than debris. Way more. Possibly bodies, strange bodies. Brazel and little Dee may have seen one or more of those bodies, too.
When the media revealed the weather-balloon explanation, something amazing happened: Roswell was largely, and very quickly, forgotten. Granted, those implicated in the affair never forgot what they saw and experienced. But, the media certainly moved on to other things. Plus, back in 1947 there were no UFO research groups around to look into the case. The result? Aside from a few, occasional, brief references in books and magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, Roswell was for all intents and purposes dead and buried – which is precisely how those charged with keeping the disturbing secret wanted it. Things changed, however, in the mid-to-late 1970s. Both William Moore and Stanton Friedman were eagerly pursuing the Roswell story by then; it was a story that was slowly but surely destined to be resurrected. It was Friedman who found the now-elderly Jesse Marcel. The long-retired major had a most interesting story to tell:
“I saw a lot of wreckage but no complete machine. It had disintegrated before it hit the ground. The wreckage was scattered over an area about three quarters of a mile long and several hundred feet wide. I was pretty well acquainted with most everything that was in the air at that time, both ours and foreign. I was also acquainted with virtually every type of weather-balloon or radar-tracking device being used by either the civilians or the military. What it was we didn’t know. We just picked up the fragments…it certainly wasn’t anything built by us.”
Mack Brazel’s son, Bill, would later say that what was found on the Foster Ranch was “…something on the order of tinfoil except that [it] wouldn’t tear…You could wrinkle it and lay it back down and it immediately resumed its original shape. Quite pliable, but you couldn’t crease or bend it like ordinary metal. Almost like a plastic, but definitely metallic in nature.” When Friedman spoke with Bill Rickett, in 1985, the also-long-retired Counter-Intelligence Corps man revealed a few snippets of information on what happened, but practically froze like a deer caught in headlights when Friedman brought up the matter of bodies. It was clearly an issue Rickett had no intention of discussing – and he didn’t. As for Sheridan Cavitt, he proved to be one of the trickiest players in the entire story. He revealed very little of substance. On occasion, he even denied having ever been at Roswell or at the crash site. Cavitt may even have withheld what he knew of the incident when, in 1994, the Air Force came knocking on his front-door, wanting answers – as will become clear later on.
What was the real story?
Since the days of the late 1970s and the 1980s, Roswell has risen to stratospheric proportions. Researchers Kevin Randle, Don Schmitt, and Tom Carey have all investigated the mystery to significant degrees. They continue to do so. The Air Force and the Government Accountability Office have both published reports on the case. Numerous non-fiction books and novels, television documentaries, and a movie have been made on the world famous affair. The number of people who have spoken out about their knowledge of what happened – whether first-, second-, or third-hand – is now well into the hundreds. People talk of dead aliens, preserved corpses, the back-engineering of alien artifacts found on the Foster Ranch, secret files on the case, old B&W photographs taken at the crash site, and more – including even suspicious deaths. People murdered to keep the truth hidden? Maybe, yes. The stakes really could be that high – even decades later. The end for Roswell is nowhere in sight. Like fictional, Tokyo-trashing Godzilla, it’s an indestructible colossus. Or is it? Perhaps, Roswell is finally verging on collapse – at least, in terms of it being perceived as an extraterrestrial event. Welcome to the latest news on the Roswell-themed story that Ufology hates and which, back in 2005, made me public enemy number one.
Numerous pro-UFO books have been written on that certain, controversial incident which occurred on the Foster Ranch in early July 1947. It has become far better known as the Roswell UFO crash. Those aforementioned books include Roswell in the 21st Century by Kevin Randle, The Children of Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, The UFO Crash at Roswell by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt, and Crash at Corona by Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner. As for the U.S. Air Force, it has now published two reports on Roswell – one in 1994 and the other in 1997. Neither report endorses the alien angle, which should surprise absolutely no-one. The conclusion of the USAF, today, is that the Roswell wreckage came not from a weather-balloon, as was claimed by the Air Force way back in July 1947, but from a huge “Mogul” balloon-array utilized to secretly monitor for Soviet atomic bomb tests in the latter part of the 1940s. As for the reports of alien bodies found at the crash site, it is the Air Force’s firm opinion that they were crash-test-dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments. There is, however, another theory for what happened outside of Roswell in early July 1947. In some ways, it’s a theory that is more controversial than the idea that aliens crashed and died on the ranch.
In June 2005, Simon & Schuster published what is without doubt the most controversial book I have ever written. Its title: Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story. It’s a book which suggested that what crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in early July 1947 was not an alien spacecraft, after all, but one of a handful of definitively terrestrial vehicles which were secretly test-flown by the U.S. military, in various parts of New Mexico. And, all over the course of several, specific months in the year in which (a) the flying saucer was born, (b) the CIA was created, and (c) the passing of the National Security Act went ahead. We’re talking about 1947. All of the flights ended in disaster, and particularly so for the people on-board. This was something which ensured that the tales, revelations and rumors of more than a few “crashed flying saucers and dead aliens,” in the Land of Enchantment, and in the late-1940s, became intertwined and confused. To the extent that they are now popularly recognized under one banner, that of the “the Roswell incident.”
The overwhelming secrecy surrounding the flights was due to the fact that certain controversy-filled pacts had secretly been put into place. They were designed to allow a large number of German and Japanese scientists to avoid prosecution for their Second World War-era war-crimes. Instead, those scientists secretly went to work for the U.S. Government – and that included working on the craft that crashed to earth outside of Roswell, New Mexico and which led to the infamous legend of the UFO crash. Some of those craft were piloted. Others had human guinea-pigs on board – handicapped people – who were strapped into gondolas and lifted high into the sky by huge balloon arrays, chiefly to further expand the scope of controversial work in the field of high-altitude exposure and early rocketry.
In other words, had the truth of Roswell surfaced back then, the floodgates would almost certainly have opened wide, and the sinister treaty - with ardent Nazis and crazed Japanese scientists who had no qualms at all about using innocent people in nightmarish experiments - would have reared its ugly head. No-one in officialdom wanted that to happen, so it was a case of burying the dark and disturbing truth of the diabolical human experimentation among a mass of tales of aliens from other worlds, flying saucers, dummies, and spy-balloons. Destroy all of the records. Deny everything that needs denying. Silence those who know too much. Create as many false leads as possible. Couldn’t be done? As I write these words in 2017, I can say with confidence that that approach has worked all too well for the last seventy years. As for the timeline that my 2005 book described, it went like this:
(Nick Redfern)
At the crash site of the Roswell event
During the latter stages of the Second World War, the Japanese military is working to perfect highly advanced balloons as weapons of war – to the extent that on June 4, 1945, a Japanese military spokesman states that their so-called Fugo balloon launches of the previous few months – balloons equipped with bombs and which result in a small number of fatalities on American soil - are merely the precursors for something far more dangerous, including large-scale attacks. The new balloons will be piloted by “death-defying” Japanese military personnel. The new balloons, American experts estimate, will be at least sixty feet in diameter and will be able to carry a pressurized gondola containing four relatively small men to a height of around 30,000 feet as the balloons travel upon their stratospheric, four-day flights across the Pacific to the United States. Similarly, declassified FBI, CIA, Air Force and British Government memoranda reveals that in the same time frame, the Germans are actively pursuing several new and novel aviation-based projects, including the construction of circular- and elliptical-shaped aircraft – a number of which are based upon the groundbreaking work of Walter and Reimar Horten, aviation geniuses who worked for the Nazis on a number of revolutionary aircraft designs.
In addition, extensive wartime research is conducted by the Japanese Government’s Unit 731 – which performed unforgivable medical atrocities on captured people - and by Nazi scientists in the extremely controversial area of human experimentation. A large body of that same experimentation is devoted to better understanding the effects of high-altitude exposure on human beings and is undertaken, in part, on physically handicapped individuals. At the close of hostilities, scientific, aviation and medical experts from Japan and Germany are secretly brought to the United States – via a secret project called Paperclip and its Japanese equivalent – where human experimentation and advanced aircraft research continues unabated and under just about the strictest security possible. President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments notes in the 1990s: “At least 1,600 scientists and their dependents were recruited and brought to the United States by Paperclip and its successor projects through the early 1970s.”
“The ACHRE also notes with respect to the time period in question that a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed. Similarly, the Committee reveals, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records, thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.” In the aftermath of the War, a number of military research sites recruit Paperclip scientists with backgrounds in aero-medicine, radiobiology and ophthalmology. Those sites include the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine - from where experiments into total-body irradiation, space medicine, space biology and flash-blindness are undertaken - and the New Mexico-based White Sands Proving Ground. The latter becomes home to the V2 rockets developed by – and captured from - Nazi Germany during the War.
In addition, at the same time that the Paperclip personnel are actively being brought to the United States, the Air Force’s Aero Medical Center gives its top priority to the translation of manuscripts providing a complete picture of German aviation medicine. Further advances are made in the field of aviation in post-war America: the Air Force awards to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation a contract that establishes Fairchild as the responsible agency of the NEPA nuclear aircraft project; and the Holloman Balloon Branch, Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, eventually goes on to become a recognized component of the space-race, via its involvement in what is known as the Discoverer program. Then, on July 1, 1947 – just a couple of days before the Foster Ranch incident happened - Major Curtis E. LeMay, Major General, U.S. Army, Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, orders that research into the biological effects of radiation on Japanese individuals should begin.
In the summer of 1947 and against this backdrop of (a) secret tests on human subjects, (b) revolutionary aircraft- and secret balloon-based programs, and (c) an influx of senior scientific, medical and aviation experts into the United States from Japan and Germany, a series of events and accidents occur on and near the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, and which lead to the deliberate creation of cover-stories concerning crashed saucers and dead E.T.s. Witnesses at several crash sites report seeing the remains of unusual-looking aircraft and small bodies, some with enlarged, bald heads, and Asian or “Oriental”-like features. On August 19, 1947, FBI Special Agent S. W. Reynolds informs the Bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, that in a meeting with a Lieutenant Colonel George D. Garrett, the latter expresses his firm belief that “the flying discs” originate with a highly classified experiment of the Army or Navy. Alien, they are not, the FBI is told.
In the immediate wake of the Roswell affair, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico – and a wartime expert on the Fugo balloons, no less – becomes deeply embroiled in the Roswell controversy; the ramifications of the Nuremberg Code begin to reverberate and rumble within the United States; and, as the November 3, 1947 issue of the Biology Division Bulletin of the Clinton National Laboratory reveals, staff take an active interest in experimentation undertaken to determine the effect of radioactive iodine on dwarfs and those afflicted with Progeria - a syndrome that results in a small stature, an enlarged, bald-head and on occasion extra fingers and toes – go ahead. Add to that the testimony of a number of elderly whistleblowers who I interviewed extensively in the early 2000s, and who chose to reveal the absolute darkest side of post-war history and secrecy, and what you have is the story told in my book. Terrible and wholly unethical experiments, rather than the bad flying skills of extraterrestrials, were at the heart of what many believe to be the most important UFO case of all.
The interviews conducted with my elderly sources began sixteen years ago, and more than a decade has now gone by since the book was published. Those sources were Al Barker, Bill Salter (both of whom worked in the field of intelligence and espionage and who were in their early eighties when I spoke with them), a retired military man who I referred to as the Colonel, and an elderly woman I called the Black Widow, and who was in her late seventies when I interviewed her in the summer of 2001. In the period since Body Snatchers in the Desert surfaced and provoked a wealth of anger, dismay and even – in some quarters – shattered dreams and crushed hopes, far more relevant information has surfaced. The picture it paints is decidedly bleak. It adds significantly to what we know of Roswell and what occurred, rather than what so many want to believe or wish happened, on that famous day back in July 1947.
I didn’t just write this book to share with you the latest news on the story that suggests aliens didn’t crash at Roswell. I also wrote it to correct some significant misconceptions. For example, when Body Snatchers in the Desert surfaced, time and time again I saw it referred to as “Nick Redfern’s theory,” or as “Nick Redfern’s story.” The implication was that I was the only one who was looking into this particular angle – or who had ever looked into it. This was, however, a major misrepresentation of the facts. People still repeat that mistake today. Part of the reason why I have chosen to write the sequel to Body Snatchers in the Desert is to demonstrate that – contrary to what some might say - numerous people and sources within Ufology have uncovered near-identical data to that which I was exposed to. In that sense, I am far from being a lone wolf. There is an entire pack of us. Also,by now you may well think I am a UFO skeptic; I can totally see why you might think that. But, I’m not a UFO skeptic; not in the slightest. I have seen enough, heard enough, experienced enough, and investigated enough to know that there is a very real UFO phenomenon in our midst. It is a phenomenon that is deeply interested in us, as a species, but which is determined to remain steadfastly in the shadows. Yes, UFOs are real. I just don’t think one crashed in the U.S. southwest in the summer of 1947.
Moving into the 1970s and the 1980s, we have three very intriguing stories from John A. Price, of the Roswell-based UFO Enigma Museum, and the author of a 1997 non-fiction book, Roswell: A Quest for the Truth. On one particular day in 1978, Price – who was employed as a roofer at the time - was working outside on a particular property in Hagerman. It’s a town situated approximately twenty-four miles from Roswell. The property held a number of handicapped children – this much was clear to Price, as several such children exited the property and stood on the patio, watching him as he worked. He thought “this must be a home for the mentally impaired.” That was not all, however. Price had more to say: “Suddenly, I almost choked on my coffee as two more children, or at least I think they were children, walked out and stood behind the others.” According to Price, they were all around four- to four-and-a-half-feet in height. They had oversized, hairless heads, and their ears and noses were noticeably smaller than normal for a young child. Things came to a sudden end when, Price recalls, “a lady came to the door and ushered the kids back into the house.” He did not see them again.
More than a decade later, Price received a letter from “an acquaintance” who he had known for some time. Price said: “In the letter he told me that the aliens I was looking for were at Fort Stanton.” For those who may not know, Fort Stanton was an installation which, during the Second World War, held a number of Japanese “enemy aliens,” and which is barely spitting distance away from the Foster Ranch. We will learn a great deal more about Fort Stanton’s wartime Japanese connections in later chapters – as well as its links to Roswell. In the meantime, back to Price. Price’s source told him that at some undisclosed point, “There were some pretty deformed young men there, several of which could be of alien nature. We only went by what we were told; please don’t tell anyone. Mongoloid large heads, small ears, pin heads who could function and had shrill voices. They were supposed to be of incest, but from their looks – Outer-space.” Price took the story seriously, and mused on the possibility that the government may have grabbed handicapped people who had “no paper trail, no social security number, and no traceable family connections.”
Nightmarish? No doubt. Right on target? That depends on the extent of your “I want to believe” factor. Someone else who suspected that Roswell could be explained in down to earth – rather than alien – fashion was yet another acquaintance of Price. His name was Robert Betz, an engineer who, prior to his retirement, had been contracted to various corporations to perform certain, sensitive work. Price said, “Robert was convinced that the Roswell crash could be explained away as a top secret project of flying saucer design and that the bodies were midgets.”
The late Leonard Stringfield, who passed away in 1994, was a UFO researcher who firmly believed that, since the 1940s, the U.S. Government had secretly recovered a number of crashed UFOs and dead aliens, and which were stored and preserved a variety of military bases across the country – many at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Stringfield, too, however, was given a number of accounts relative to the issue of secret and shocking human experimentation on handicapped people; experimentation that was tied in with the Roswell affair.
One of those stories came to Stringfield from a highly controversial figure in Ufology. His name was Timothy Cooper, a resident of Big Bear Lake, California and someone who exited the field of UFO research years ago. Far more than a few people in Ufology have very little time for Cooper, suspecting that many of the documents he supplied to the UFO community in the mid-1990s were bogus, rather than the highly classified papers that they were purported to be. They were bogus; there is no doubt about that. But, Cooper himself was not the forger. It’s the “pre-documents” era we have to take a look at, however. It paints a very different picture of Cooper to that which many ufologists have accepted.
Tim Cooper claimed to Stringfield in 1990 that he had numerous sources of the old-timer kind – some of who assured Cooper that, yes, aliens really did crash outside of Roswell in the summer of 1947. Others, however, quietly hinted to Cooper that the truth was far more controversial: a scenario involving human guinea-pigs – Japanese and handicapped individuals - and the creation of UFO-themed disinformation programs and faked, pro-UFO documents to hide the down-to-earth truth of the Roswell enigma. Also in 1990, Cooper supplied Stringfield one specific story which Stringfield decided to firmly keep under wraps until the following year, 1991, when he published it in a lengthy report on tales of crashed and secretly retrieved alien spacecraft. The story concerned a woman who Cooper first crossed paths with in 1989. He described her only as a nurse, and gave her the pseudonym of “Mary.” As you will soon see soon, that alias was not too far off from the real name of another nurse linked to the story. Decades ago, Cooper’s informant allegedly worked at what is, today, the New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In Cooper’s own words of 1990, and which Stringfield published: “She casually mentioned to me over coffee that ‘bodies’ were being flown to Los Alamos periodically from late 1945 to sometime in 1947. I asked her if she had seen these ‘bodies’ and she said no, but others had. I asked her where these ‘bodies’ were coming from. She said she did not know but it was rumored that they were human experiments for biological and nuclear medicine research. She thought they may have come from Japan after the war. I asked her why she thought that. She said that they were small bodies with deformed heads and limbs. The eyes were abnormally big, she was told. She did have some view of them in the morgue very briefly for a few minutes at some distance. I asked her why she was allowed to be present at the autopsies. She told me that she was asked to assist in the preparation and cleanup. I asked her again about the bodies. She said they were being flown in on special transport planes equipped with refrigerator units to keep the bodies from decomposing. The flesh was badly burned and charred. There was no hair on the heads and had a grayish-yellow color. That’s all she knew.” But, I think I know: a secret military experiment that went disastrous. And it was all hidden under an "alien" angle
Some of the Weirdest Supposed Alien Artifacts Found on Earth - PART II
