“General Ramey’s retraction [of the press release] was in the morning papers of July 9,” Mr. Haut says. “Within a week there was very, very little, if any, interest shown in the incident. It was over. It died real quick.”
But Mr. Haut—and many others—remain convinced that General Ramey’s weather balloon and Mr. Brazel’s revised description were the beginning of a cover-up designed by higher-ups in Washington.
This is Mr. Haut’s outline of the events:
“Proctor told Mac Brazel to come in to the sheriff of Chaves County. He did, on the sixth of July. The sheriff sees what he’s got, and he calls the base commander. The base commander calls his intelligence agent and his CIC [counterintelligence] agent to meet him at the sheriff’s office. Blanchard sees what it is, he takes it back to the base and tells both his intelligence agent and his CIC agent, ‘Go out with this guy and bring back everything you can bring back.’ That’s all [taking place] on the sixth. He then calls General Ramey and tells him about this material. Not much happens on the seventh of July until Jesse Marcel and the CIC boy return with more of the wreckage, which also is sent to Fort Worth. Not much happens on the eighth of July until around noontime, when Haut comes into the foreground and lets his press release go. Then General Ramey, five or six hours later, comes back and says, ‘Oh no. It’s a weather balloon.’ Why didn’t he know it was a weather balloon on the sixth of July, when he saw it? He knew what a weather balloon looked like. So did Blanchard. So did Marcel. So did Mac Brazel, for that matter. The brass had that material in their hands for two days. My feeling is that someone—I wouldn’t want to guess who—starts thinking, ‘We’ve got to cover this up.’ And how better a way to cover it up than to have a colonel say, ‘Yes, we do have a flying saucer,’ and then to have a general come out and say, ‘Oh no, that was a weather balloon’? It was a pretty good cover. The whole thing died almost immediately.”
If he and Colonel Blanchard goofed up by distributing the news release, Mr. Haut says, none of their commanders ever reprimanded them. Colonel Blanchard eventually became a four-star general and served as deputy chief of staff of the Air Force. Mr. Haut resigned from the Air Force less than a year after the Roswell Incident. He stayed in Roswell and went into the insurance business. Twenty-eight years later, he gave up insurance and for ten years ran a gallery and frame shop.
His resignation, he says, was in no way connected to the press release. General Ramey was about to be promoted, and Colonel Blanchard was going to take over command of the 8th Air Force. “He told me, ‘You’re going to Fort Worth with me, and you’re going to be the public information officer for the 8th Air Force,’ ” Mr. Haut says. “But I had made up my mind to stay here. Blanchard and I were extremely close. If we were at the Officers’ Club, my wife and I sat at his table all the time. If someone was dancing too close with his wife, I would have to go and cut in.”
When General Blanchard died in 1965, the Air Force sent a lieutenant colonel from the Roswell base to notify Mr. Haut. “He introduces himself,” Mr. Haut remembers, “and he says, ‘I have some very sad news for you. General Blanchard passed away at 8:10 this morning at the Pentagon in a staff meeting. Nothing could be released to the press until you personally were notified.’ I still get choked up when I think about it.”
In 1992, Mr. Haut and some of his friends opened the International UFO Museum and Research Center across Main Street from the Chaves County Courthouse in a building they rent from the city for a dollar a year. It contains 118 UFO books, shelves of reports and papers from the Center for UFO Research in suburban Washington, photographs, newspaper clippings, a reading room, a TV room for viewing more than twenty UFO videotapes, and a shop selling UFO T-shirts, videos, books, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and reproductions of the Roswell newspapers headlining Mr. Haut’s press release: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region” and General Ramey’s retraction: “Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer.”
There also is a huge painting depicting a flying-saucer crash, and a statue of a small alien from outer space called RALF (Roswell Alien Life Form). More than twenty thousand people have visited the museum since it opened.
“Why do I feel so strongly that it was a flying saucer?” Mr. Haut asks. “Because of Major Marcel, who was the base intelligence officer. I spent several hours with him on two different occasions, and he was so adamant about the materials. Foil that you could take in your hand and crumple it up as tight as you could, and it would spring back to its original shape after you released it, without any creases. Nothing! Even to this day, I don’t think we have a metal that has a memory built into it like that. He talked about a thirty-inch I-beam that they hit with a nineteen-pound sledge hammer, and it bounced off of it. And transparent wires that resembled today’s fiber optics. I have no reason to doubt Marcel’s honesty. He had no ax to grind. He was adamant about the fact that these materials were not of this planet.”
Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who used to work on government projects for General Electric, Westinghouse, and other companies, became interested in flying saucers back in the 1950s. For the past twelve years, he says, he has lectured full time about them, at more than six hundred colleges and to more than one hundred other audiences in all fifty states, nine Canadian provinces, and Germany and Finland.
“And I’ve done a lot of radio and TV,” he says. “Everything from Nightline to Unsolved Mysteries to Sally Jesse Raphael.”
One day in 1978, while waiting to be interviewed at a television station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was having coffee with the station manager. “And the manager, out of the blue, says, ‘You know, the guy you ought to talk to is Jesse Marcel.’ and I said, ‘Who’s he?’ And he said, ‘Well, he handled pieces of one of those saucers you’re interested in when he was in the military.’ ”
Mr. Marcel, long since retired from the Air Force, was living in Houma, Louisiana. Mr. Friedman called him and heard, for the first time, the story of the Roswell Incident. But, says Mr. Friedman, Mr. Marcel couldn’t remember when it had happened.
“Not long thereafter, I was giving a lecture at Bemidji State College in Minnesota, and two people came up to me and asked if I had heard of a crashed saucer in New Mexico. There was a third story early on about a woman who tried to put a story about the crashed saucer, which had been called in from Roswell, on the wire, and her transmission was interrupted on the teletype by the message: ‘Do not continue this transmission. FBI.’ Then a fellow told me about an English actor named Dewey Greene who was driving from the West Coast to the East Coast. The actor claimed in his autobiography that he heard on his radio in New Mexico about a crashed flying saucer, but when he got to the East Coast, there was nothing.”
Mr. Friedman, who lives in Canada, and a partner, William Moore, began investigating the origins of the stories about the crash. General Blanchard, Mac Brazel, Floyd Proctor, Sheriff Wilcox and many of the servicemen who participated in the events had since died, but friends, associates, and relatives told second- and third-hand stories about what had been discovered in the desert in 1947.
Mr. Friedman and Mr. Moore concluded that the wreckage Mr. Brazel found was part of a flying saucer that was struck by lightning or experienced some malfunction during that stormy night over Lincoln County. According to their theory, an explosion blew a hole in the saucer and sent debris falling onto Mr. Brazel’s pasture. The saucer itself crashed several miles farther on. An army pilot, perhaps with Mr. Brazel aboard his plane, spotted the wreckage. Soldiers recovered the craft and the dead bodies of its crew of extraterrestrial aliens. Mr. Friedman, Mr. Moore, and other UFO believers contend that the bodies and the pieces of the saucer then were packed up and flown to Fort Worth and/or to Washington and/or to secret facilities at what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
The stories of these theories and investigations—and others—have been published in at least three books: The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, UFO C
rash at Roswell by Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, and Mr. Friedman’s own Crash at Corona, which he wrote with Don Berliner.
In their book, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Berliner claim a second saucer crashed on the Plains of San Agustin, near Magdalena, New Mexico, about 150 miles west of Mr. Brazel’s ranch, and that the army recovered that craft, too, along with several bodies and at least one live space alien.
In Roswell, stories are still told about autopsies performed at the base hospital on small alien corpses with large heads and gray skin, of soldiers catching unauthorized glimpses of the strange bodies, of a frightened nurse drawing pictures of them for a friend.
When John Tilley came to Roswell as a young GI in December 1947, about six months after the Roswell Incident, he heard a disturbing tale which he still passes on.
“The scuttlebutt at the base,” he says, “was that something had escaped from the military, and that whatever had escaped had left the base and was peering through windows and scaring the heck out of people. That didn’t mean anything to an eighteen-year-old kid from West Virginia. But four or five years ago, I met a UFO historian who told me that in UFO circles there has always been a whispered rumor that one of the four aliens that crashed at Corona was alive and that it escaped. And when the military located it near the base gate, they killed it. They were afraid of it. So you take that and put it together with what I heard, and what have you got?”
Mr. Tilley and his friend John Price operate the Outa Limits UFO Enigma Museum at the south end of Main Street, not far from the gate of the old air base, which is now an industrial park. A slightly older rival of sorts to Mr. Haut’s downtown International UFO Museum and Research Center, the Enigma Museum walls are covered with newspaper clippings about UFO sightings, people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, and the filming of a Showtime cable TV movie about the incident, starring country singer Dwight Yoakam as Mac Brazel.
But the centerpiece of the museum is a diorama of a crashed saucer, made of two eight-foot TV satellite dishes welded together and painted silver, with real smoke wafting from the wreckage. Dead aliens, made by Mr. Price’s sister, are scattered about. A store-window mannequin dressed as an army MP stands guard over them.
“We have reason to believe that some people still have parts of the saucer and photographs of it,” Mr. Tilley says. “They just won’t come out because the government would take these things away from them. So we have got ourselves a bona fide UFO phenomenon mystery.”
“The biggest story of the millennium,” Mr. Friedman, the author, calls it. “Visits to Planet Earth by alien spacecraft,” he says. “A successful cover-up of the best data for almost forty-seven years. Quite a remarkable achievement. A cosmic Watergate.”
That’s what bothers Congressman Schiff: the possibility that the government hid—and maybe continues to hide—the truth about the Roswell Incident from the people.
“On the issue of UFOs, I fall more closely into the group that are called skeptics,” he says, “in the sense that an extraterrestrial explanation is not what pops into my mind. My first two possibilities would be as follows:
“1. It really was a weather balloon. It has just been a public relations fiasco for the Defense Department from back in 1947 until today.
“2. And now I’m into sheer conjecture—that it was some kind of military experiment from White Sands, a Cold War experiment of some kind, that went awry.
“But I don’t think the bottom-line belief is what’s important here. That’s not why I got into this. The real issue is: Are people entitled to an accounting of the records of their government? I knew when I started this that, because the issue of flying saucers was involved, I possibly would be subject to some ridicule. ‘Why are you helping people who believe flying saucers crashed and alien bodies are being hidden?’ And the answer to that is, it doesn’t matter what they believe. The people who have come to me have said, ‘We are interested in knowing what the government did with its files.’ I think that’s a reasonable request by any citizen of this country. And I don’t think it matters whether the subject of their inquiry is extraterrestrial creatures or radiation experiments or any other subject. The people are entitled to know what their government did. And that should not be, if you’ll pardon the expression, a federal case. I’m intent on seeing that the people who want to see these records can see whatever’s available, or get an explanation of what happened to them if they don’t exist anymore. What they choose to believe or not believe is their business.”
The Government Accounting Office is working on it, he says. He has given no deadline. Whenever and whatever the GAO reports back to him, he will report to the people.
And he will leave it to others to answer the question that Loretta Proctor poses to the skeptics:
“If we’re here, why can’t somebody be somewhere else?”
May 1994
My earliest memories are of a farm in Comanche County, Texas, near the Hamilton County line, and Carlton, a tiny community on the Hamilton side of the line. In those places, I spent the first eight years of my life. The farm is the one described in “Generations,” the first piece in this book. The town is the one mentioned in “Mrs. Miller.”
A great sadness comes over me whenever I remember those places.
A Memoir of Hamilton and Comanche Counties
They tell me of a home where my friends have gone,
O they tell me of that land far away,
Where the tree of life in eternal bloom
Sheds its fragrance thro’ the unclouded day.
—hymn
The Baptist Church stood on one side of the square, and the Methodist Church on the other. The Church of Christ was just across the road. In the middle of the square stood a large shed with a shingle roof. All the sides of the shed were open. Under it were rows of crude wooden benches with an aisle down the middle, and at one end of the shed was a platform for the choir and a pulpit for the evangelist. The shed was called “the Tabernacle,” and it was used by the churches for their revivals in the summertime.
The main purpose of the revivals was to save souls—to persuade us to desert the deadly pathways of sin, accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, be baptized into whichever of the households of faith was occupying the Tabernacle at the moment, and live thenceforth in the knowledge that death would not be our end, but the beginning of our eternal life of joy with God in his heaven. For those whose souls already had been saved, the revivals offered a chance to revive the spirit, to shore up a rickety determination, to suck in the gut of faith and persevere with the righteous life. And for everybody they were a chance to get together and talk about the weather and the children and the war—World War II—in which many young men from the town and the farms were fighting, in Europe and Asia and Africa and the South Pacific, half a world away from Carlton, Texas, and everything they had ever known.
There were two preaching services a day during the revivals—one in the morning, which was supposed to end about noon, and one in the evening.
In the evening, when the young men had finished their work for the day, and the young mothers had washed and put away the supper dishes and dressed their sons in clean shirts and overalls and their daughters in pinafores, and the families were arriving in the square in their old Fords and Chevrolets, there was a festive air about the revivals. Before the service, the men would lean against the cars and talk, their cigarettes glowing like orange lightning bugs in the darkness. The young women would hustle their babies and toddlers into the Tabernacle and arrange them along the benches, and visit with the mothers on the bench ahead and the mothers on the bench behind. We school-age kids—six to ten or so years old—would play tag or hide-and-seek among the cars until a father or mother came to herd us to the Tabernacle.
Sometimes we children would stand in front of the congregation and sing a song that we sang only at revivals:
I’ve got that Baptist booster spizerinctum
Down in my heart,
<
br /> Down in my heart,
Down in my heart!
I’ve got that Baptist booster spizerinctum
Down in my heart,
Down in my heart to stay!
The morning service was attended mostly by the older women and men of the town and whatever children could be dragged to it. I was about six years old when my grandmother began taking me along.
The word that comes into my mind as I remember those interminable hours of squirming on the hard wooden benches is “hot”—the perspiring faces of the women and the faint whit, whit of their cardboard funeral-home fans trying to stir a breeze into the sticky air; the torrid white sunlight just beyond the edge of the Tabernacle roof; the sweating evangelist, coatless, his necktie loosened, leaning over the pulpit, and his detailed description of the eternal fires of hell and the everlasting agonies of those doomed to dwell therein; the fervent tears of the repentant as they plodded down the aisle, hunched under the weight of their sins.
Outside the Tabernacle, beyond the edges of the town, under the pale, blinding sky, locusts were whirring in the creek bottoms, milk cows were grazing, and the crops that gave us our livelihood and were Carlton’s only reason for being—the corn, the maize, the oats, the hay, the wheat, the cotton—were creeping silently upward from the dark earth.
One of the farms belonged to us. Our hogs were grunting in their pen, wallowing in their mud, seeking coolness. Our chickens—white Plymouth Rocks and a few bantams—were strutting about the barnyard, pecking at the ground, their yellow eyes blinking. On the front porch, my father’s hounds—asleep and perhaps dreaming—were thumping the floorboards with their tails. Whenever a puff of breeze came up, the windmill wheel would groan and turn a time or two, and the sucker rod would move slowly up the pipe and drop a dollop of cool water into the tank.
Generations and Other True Stories Page 17